Two experiments investigated observers' perception of 3-D structure when optical sources of information were contradictory. When motion and stereoscopic disparities specified different surfaces, the perceptual outcome dependent strongly on the direction of curvature present within each modality. Previous research has shown that the perception of surface slant and curvature is anisotropic for bo...

According to recent embodied cognition theories, mental concepts are represented by modality-specific sensory-motor systems. Much of the evidence for modality-specificity in conceptual processing comes from the property-verification task. When applying this and other tasks, it is important to select items based on their modality-exclusivity. We collected modality ratings for a set of 387 proper...

Stimulation of one sensory modality can induce perceptual experiences in another modality that reflect synaesthetic correspondences among different dimensions of sensory experience. In visual-hearing synaesthesia, for example, higher pitched sounds induce visual images that are brighter, smaller, higher in space, and sharper than those induced by lower pitched sounds. Claims that neonatal perce...

Recent studies have reported that in normal healthy individuals, the perception of illusory sensations in one modality can be induced by the presentation of a stimulus in another modality. These illusory sensations may arise from the activation of a tactile representation in memory induced by the non-target stimulus, in a process mirroring that thought to be responsible for many forms of medica...

Although musical training has been correlated with modulations of early perceptual and attentional processes, the majority of investigations neglect the possibility of cross modality enhancements. We investigated the effects of musical training by measuring spatial and temporal attention in a temporal order judgment task in auditory, visual, and crossmodal conditions with and without non-predic...

Traditionally, perception was considered to be an encapsulated process that was unaffected by top-down processes like affect. Recent work in vision draws this framework into question by showing that changes in the affective state of the perceiver can impact many different aspects of visual perception. Here, we extend the relationship between affect and perception into another perceptual modalit...

When learners encode sequential patterns and generalize their knowledge to novel instances, are they relying on abstract or stimulus-specific representations? Artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiments showing transfer of learning from one stimulus set to another has encouraged the view that learning is mediated by abstract representations that are independent of the sense modality or percep...

According to perceptual load theory, processing of task-irrelevant stimuli is limited by the perceptual load of a parallel attended task if both the task and the irrelevant stimuli are presented to the same sensory modality. However, it remains a matter of debate whether the same principles apply to cross-sensory perceptual load and, more generally, what form cross-sensory attentional modulatio...

How human beings integrate information from external sources and internal cognition to produce a coherent experience is still not well understood. During the past decades, anatomical, neurophysiological and neuroimaging research in multimodal integration have stood out in the effort to understand the perceptual binding properties of the brain. Areas in the human lateral occipitotemporal, prefro...

Implicit memory is often thought to reflect an influence of past experience on perceptual processes, yet priming effects are found when the perceptual format of stimuli changes between study and test episodes. Such cross-modal priming effects have been hypothesized to depend upon stimulus recoding processes whereby a stimulus presented in one modality is converted to other perceptual formats. T...