A new Molyneux's problem: Sounds, shapes and arbitrary crossmodal correspondences

Several studies in cognitive sciences have highlighted the existence of privileged and universal psychological associations between shape attributes, such as angularity, and auditory dimensions, such as pitch. These results add a new puzzle to the list of arbitrary-looking crossmodal matching tendencies whose origin is hard to explain. The puzzle is all the more general in the case of shape that the shapes-sounds correspondences have a wide set of documented effects on perception and behaviour: Sounds can for instance influence the way a certain shape is perceived (Sweeny et al., 2012). In this talk, we suggest that the study of these crossmodal correspondences can be related to the more classical cases of crossmodal transfer of shape between vision and touch documented as part of Molyneux’s question, and reveal the role that movement plays as an amodal invariant in explaining the variety of multimodal associations around shape.