… people learn a visual task better when it’s accompanied by sound, for instance — even when they are later tested using only vision.
— Humphries, 2011: The new science of our cross-wired senses in The Boston Globe.
What I think this means, is that there is now scientific evidence to support the widespread use of sound effects in lectures/presentations. Woohoo!
For the educator, the interaction between sound and vision is one of the fascinating findings of recent research on how our senses interact (see also the work of the Visual & Multisensory Perception Lab). It seems to add some support to the arguments for multimodal learning; rather than just targeting specific learning styles — auditory vs visual vs kinetic etc.– to specific people, including multiple styles of information should help everyone learn better.
But beyond just education a better understanding of how the senses interact has a lot of implications.
… what people saw affected what they heard; that certain types of music or background noise affected how food tasted; and that smells could influence how a texture felt to the touch.
— Humphries, 2011: The new science of our cross-wired senses in The Boston Globe.
This research is already affecting how things are marketed and presented to us.
A study published this year showed that people thought a strawberry mousse tasted sweeter, more intense, and better when they ate it off a white plate rather than a black plate.
— Humphries, 2011: The new science of our cross-wired senses in The Boston Globe.
This research is also pertinent to the issue of Sensory Integration Disorder, which, by some estimates, affects somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 20 children.