Seeing objects improves our hearing of the sounds they make

It has been established that lip reading improves the perception of auditory speech. But does seeing objects themselves help us hear better the sounds they make? Here we report a series of psychophysical experiments in humans showing that the visual enhancement of auditory sensitivity is not confined to speech. We further show that the crossmodal enhancement was associated with the conscious visualization of the stimulus: we can better hear the sounds an object makes when we are conscious of seeing that object. Our work extends an intriguing crossmodal effect, previously circumscribed to speech, to a wider domain of real-world objects, and suggests that consciousness contributes to this effect.