Sound enhances visual perception: cross-modal effects of auditory organization on vision

Six experiments demonstrated cross-modal influences from the auditory modality on the visual modality at an early level of perceptual organization. Participants had to detect a visual target in a rapidly changing sequence of visual distractors. A high tone embedded in a sequence of low tones improved detection of a synchronously presented visual target (Experiment 1), but the effect disappeared when the high tone was presented before the target (Experiment 2). Rhythmically based or order-based anticipation was unlikely to account for the effect because the improvement was unaffected by whether there was jitter (Experiment 3) or a random number of distractors between successive targets (Experiment 4). The facilitatory effect was greatly reduced when the tone was less abrupt and part of a melody (Experiments 5 and 6). These results show that perceptual organization in the auditory modality can have an effect on perceptibility in the visual modality.