Subliminal audio-visual temporal congruency in music videos enhances perceptual pleasure

Human perception is inherently multisensory, with cross-modal integration playing a critical role in generating a coherent perceptual experience. To understand the causes of pleasurable experiences, we must understand whether and how the relationship between separate sensory modalities influences our experience of pleasure. We investigated the effect of congruency between vision and audition in the form of temporal alignment between the cuts in a video and the beats in an accompanying soundtrack. Despite the subliminal nature of the manipulation, a higher perceptual pleasure was found for temporal congruency compared with incongruency. These results suggest that the temporal aspect of the interaction between the visual and auditory modalities plays a critical role in shaping our perceptual pleasure, even when such interaction is not accessible to conscious awareness.