Seeing objects helps us better hear the sounds they make

It has been established that lip-reading improves the perception of auditory speech stimuli. But does the visual enhancement of auditory sensitivity extend to “objects” other than speech? In other words, does seeing an object help one hear it better? Here we report a series of psychophysical experiments in humans showing that the visual enhancement of auditory sensitivity generalizes to material objects. We further show that the crossmodal enhancement was modulated by 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. We also connect the phenomenon of consciousness with functional consequences on the ability of one sensory modality to enhance the sensitivity of another.