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Randomized Controlled Trial
. 2013 Sep 3;110(36):14580-5.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1221454110. Epub 2013 Aug 19.

Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance

Chia-Jung Tsay  1
Affiliations
Randomized Controlled Trial

Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance

Chia-Jung Tsay. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Social judgments are made on the basis of both visual and auditory information, with consequential implications for our decisions. To examine the impact of visual information on expert judgment and its predictive validity for performance outcomes, this set of seven experiments in the domain of music offers a conservative test of the relative influence of vision versus audition. People consistently report that sound is the most important source of information in evaluating performance in music. However, the findings demonstrate that people actually depend primarily on visual information when making judgments about music performance. People reliably select the actual winners of live music competitions based on silent video recordings, but neither musical novices nor professional musicians were able to identify the winners based on sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound. The results highlight our natural, automatic, and nonconscious dependence on visual cues. The dominance of visual information emerges to the degree that it is overweighted relative to auditory information, even when sound is consciously valued as the core domain content.

Keywords: cognition; communication; decision making; evaluation; social perception.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
A comparison of the reported importance of sound vs. visuals for evaluation (Left), with the % novices identifying actual competition outcomes when given sound-only vs. video-only stimuli (Right), in experiment 2 (n = 106).
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
The % professional musicians identifying actual competition outcomes given sound-only, video-only, or video-plus-sound stimuli, in experiment 5 (n = 103). Thirty-three percent indicates an identification rate at chance.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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