Perceptual Comparisons with Pictures and Environmental Sounds

This research involves perceptual comparisons with cues that vary in one of four ways (picture, sound, spoken word or printed word) and with targets that are either pictures or environmental sounds. Students were required to match cue-target pairs and determine whether the 2 successive events represented features drawn from the same item. Both the perceptual/linguistic format and the modality of the cue influenced responses to pictures and environmental sounds, but the cue type effects were qualified by same/different response type and with picture targets by left or right presentation location. These results provide some additional evidence of processing asymmetry when pictures are directed to either the right or left hemisphere, as well as for some asymmetries in cross modal cueing. Implications of these findings for theories of multisensory processing and models of object recognition are discussed.