Auditory perception: Interactions with vision

© Oxford University Press, 2010. All rights reserved. What is heard is determined by much more than the sounds entering the ears, and the real-world perception needs to be understood as a multisensory experience. This article describes how auditory information combines and interacts with that from vision. It highlights some of the key studies demonstrating how auditory processing in humans can be modified by the presentation of visual stimuli. It focuses on interactions between audition and vision both for reasons of space and also because, as it happens, the majority of the research published to date has tended to focus on cross-modal interactions in human information processing between these two senses. Finally, it reviews several sources of evidence showing that the presentation of visual stimuli can have a variety of qualitatively different effects on a person's auditory perception.