Multisensory encoding improves auditory recognition

Recent studies have challenged the long-held belief that recognition is unfailingly degraded by contextual differences between study and test items. In these studies, recognition of pictures presented in silence was better when during study or initial exposure the images were accompanied by a semantically congruent sound rather than silence. In the present study, we sought to examine the generalization of this phenomenon to auditory recognition and found a significant improvement in the recognition of auditory items when coupled with a congruent picture. We discuss these findings within the framework of the redintegration hypothesis of memory retrieval as well as Bayesian inference and learning.