Edited by Dale Purves, Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School, Singapore, Singapore, and approved July 12, 2013 (received for review December 21, 2012)
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.
Author contributions : C.T. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
The author declares no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
*Participants who did not report their sex were not included in the calculation.
†Participants were recruited from a community sample in the northeastern United States and were paid $20 for their participation in an hour-long set of unrelated studies that included the current experiment.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1221454110/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
