Khaberni - The relationship between the senses is more complex than it appears in our daily lives; no sense operates in isolation from the others, but they intersect in ways that affect our perception of the world around us.
Among these relationships, the connection between hearing and vision stands out as one of the most interesting areas for researchers to understand how one sense can enhance or weaken another.
A new scientific study reveals that opening the eyes may help improve hearing ability more than many assume.
This finding challenges the common belief that closing the eyes enhances auditory focus by reducing visual distractions; the evidence suggests that the matter may be more complex than that.
Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China conducted a series of experiments to test the relationship between vision and hearing, involving 25 volunteers who were asked to distinguish specific sounds amid high background noise of 70 decibels, under different visual conditions: closing their eyes, or looking at an empty screen, or at a still image, or at a video related to the sound.
The results showed that participants' performance improved significantly when they opened their eyes, compared to when they closed them. It also turned out that the type of visual input plays an important role in auditory accuracy.
When closing their eyes, participants needed the sound to be about 1.32 decibels louder to be able to hear it compared to the reference condition. However, when looking at a still image related to the sound, they could hear it even at a level about 1.6 decibels lower. Meanwhile, watching a video related to the sound achieved the best results, as the hearing threshold decreased by about 2.98 decibels.
To delve deeper into these results, the researchers used electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings to monitor brain activity during the experiment.
It was found that closing the eyes leads to the brain filtering sounds more strictly, which reduces its ability to catch precise auditory signals amid the noise. On the other hand, visual engagement helps enhance the integration between what a person sees and hears, improving auditory processing efficiency.
Researcher Yu Huang says that closing the eyes, though it may seem a way to increase focus, can be counterproductive in noisy environments, because it reduces the brain's ability to separate the targeted sound from the surrounding noise.
The study also indicates that the alignment between visual and auditory information plays a crucial role, as watching scenes related to the sound may prompt the brain to enhance its auditory perception and connect it with the visual context.
However, the results do not deny that closing the eyes may be beneficial in some quiet environments to improve auditory focus, as previous research suggests. But in the noisy modern world, opening the eyes and engaging visually may be more effective in supporting hearing.
The results were published in the journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
