Fluent reprocessing of perceptual aspects of recently experienced stimuli is thought to support repetition priming effects on implicit perceptual memory tests. Although behavioral and neuropsychological dissociations demonstrate that separable mnemonic processes and neural substrates mediate implicit and explicit test performance, dual-process theories of memory posit that explicit recognition ...

Priming effects to words are reduced when modality changes from study to test. This change was examined here using behavioral and electrophysiological measures of priming. During the study, half of the words were presented visually and half auditorally; during a subsequent lexical decision test, all words were presented visually. Lexical decisions were faster for within- than cross-modality rep...

Most displays or other devices designed to communicate information focus on a single sensory modality. This is perhaps a consequence of the fact that most research examining human perceptual capabilities has focused on a single sensory system at a time. However, most events in the natural environment generate physical information affecting multiple sensory modalities. This information is typica...

Two kinds of rifts separate perceptual researchers: theoretical and modality-specific. Theoretical rifts divide modality-specific communities, and modality-specific rifts divide theoretical communities. Each group seeks to understand perception, but each uses such different approaches that synthesis into one coherent theory has been impossible. Here, we examine the fissures and propose a theory...

Previous studies demonstrated that the sequential verification of different sensory modality properties for concepts (e.g., BLENDER-loud; BANANA-yellow) brings about a processing cost, known as the modality-switch effect. We report an experiment designed to assess the influence of the mode of presentation (i.e., visual, aural) of stimuli on the modality-switch effect in a property verification ...

Theories of embodied cognition suggest that conceptual processing relies on the same neural resources that are utilized for perception and action. Evidence for these perceptual simulations comes from neuroimaging and behavioural research, such as demonstrations of somatotopic motor cortex activations following the presentation of action-related words, or facilitation of grasp responses followin...

2. Definitions Due to differences on terminology usage in the literature the terms modality, medium and representation need to be defined. In a communication act, such as learning in a classroom, modality refers to the sensory or perceptual experience (e.g. visual, tactile, etc.) and is closely related to the individual. Medium is a means of conveying a representation (to a human), e.g. a diagr...

Neuroscientific investigations regarding aspects of emotional experiences usually focus on one stimulus modality (e.g., pictorial or verbal). Similarities and differences in the processing between the different modalities have rarely been studied directly. The comparison of verbal and pictorial emotional stimuli often reveals a processing advantage of emotional pictures in terms of larger or mo...

Little is known about the processing of non-verbal sounds in the primary progressive aphasias. Here, we investigated the processing of complex non-verbal sounds in detail, in a consecutive series of 20 patients with primary progressive aphasia [12 with progressive non-fluent aphasia; eight with semantic dementia]. We designed a novel experimental neuropsychological battery to probe complex soun...

Stimuli that elicit a prepotent but incorrect response are typically associated with an enhanced electrophysiological N2 that is thought to index the operation of a control process such as inhibition or conflict detection. However, recent studies reporting the absence of the N2 modulation in go/no-go tasks involving auditory stimuli challenge this view: It is not clear why inhibition or conflic...