Furthermore, neuroimaging studies have found that imagining a sound activates secondary auditory areas 15, 16, 17 and that imagining sounds of different frequencies activates frequency-specific areas of the auditory cortex 13. Classic studies on auditory imagery, for instance, have found that imagining a tone can aid the detection of that tone 3 and that the time required to scan an imagined familiar song for a specific lyric (a task that requires auditory imagery) is proportional to the time it takes for that lyric to occur in the song 6. However, decades of research on mental imagery-one’s willed simulation of sensory perception-has found that this is not always the case 1, 2, 3, 4 and that imagined and real sensory stimuli often reflect similar processes, both phenomenologically and in the brain 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. We usually believe that the things we imagine in our mind and the things we perceive in the external world are perceptually distinct from one another and therefore, that what we imagine should not influence what we perceive. Together, these findings suggest that this imagery-induced multisensory illusion reflects the successful integration of real and imagined cross-modal sensory stimuli, and more generally, that what we imagine hearing can change what we see. In a separate experiment, we ruled out the possibility that changes in attention (i.e., sensitivity index d′) or response bias (response bias index c) were sufficient to explain this effect.
Moreover, the vividness of the participants’ auditory imagery predicted the strength of this imagery-induced illusion. The results from this study revealed that auditory imagery of a sound with acoustic properties typical of a collision (i.e., damped sound) promoted the bounce-percept, but auditory imagery of the same sound played backwards (i.e., ramped sound) did not.
Here, we made use of the cross-bounce illusion in which an auditory stimulus presented at the moment two passing objects meet promotes the perception that the objects bounce off rather than cross by one another to examine whether the content of imagined sound changes visual motion perception in a manner that is consistent with multisensory integration.
Can what we imagine hearing change what we see? Whether imagined sensory stimuli are integrated with external sensory stimuli to shape our perception of the world has only recently begun to come under scrutiny.
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