Lawrence E. Marks
John B. Pierce Lab. and Yale Univ., 290 Congress Ave., New Haven, CT 06519
Cross-modal perception encompasses two distinct domains. One domain consists of those objects, events, or environmental conditions (e.g., phonemes, shapes of objects, locations in space or time) about which different sensory modalities can provide common information; the other domain consists of dimensions or qualities of perceptual experience in different modalities that bear a perceptual similarity that itself need not reflect any communality in the environment (e.g., between greater auditory pitch and greater visual brightness). Cross-modal relations pervade perception, and they are readily determined through several psychophysical paradigms, including measures of perceptual equivalence between stimuli presented to different modalities (cross-modal matches); measures of cross-modal similarity, assessed by multidimensional scaling; and measures of cross-modal interactions in response speed and accuracy during stimulus classification. Although many cross-modal relations are grounded in perceptual similarities or environmental communalities, interactions in the processing of stimuli presented to different senses can readily be modulated by language, and can also depend on semantic recoding. [Work supported by NIH Grant DC00271.]