Processing of a given target is facilitated when it is defined within the same (e.g., visual-visual), compared to a different (e.g., tactile-visual), perceptual modality as on the previous trial [Spence, C., Nicholls, M., & Driver, J. The cost of expecting events in the wrong sensory modality. Perception & Psychophysics, 63, 330-336, 2001]. The present study was designed to identify electrocort...

The blink reflex is modulated if a weak lead stimulus precedes the blink-eliciting stimulus. In two experiments, we examined the effects of the sensory modality of the lead and blink-eliciting stimuli on blink modulation. Acoustic, visual, or tactile lead stimuli were followed by an acoustic (Experiment 1) or an electrotactile (Experiment 2) blink-eliciting stimulus at lead intervals of -30, 0,...

Previous studies showed that the sequential verification of different sensory modality properties for concepts (e.g., BLENDER-loud; BANANA-yellow) incurs a processing cost, known as the modality-switch effect (Pecher et al. 2003; 2004). We assessed the influence of the mode of presentation of stimuli on the modality-switch effect in a property verification priming paradigm. Participants were re...

Theories of embodied cognition (e.g., Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory; Barsalou, 1999, 2009) suggest that modality specific simulations underlie the representation of concepts. Supporting evidence comes from modality switch costs: participants are slower to verify a property in one modality (e.g., auditory, BLENDER-loud) after verifying a property in a different modality (e.g., gustatory, CRAN...

Implicit statistical learning (ISL) is exclusive to neither a particular sensory modality nor a single domain of processing. Even so, differences in perceptual processing may substantially affect learning across modalities. In three experiments, statistically equivalent auditory and visual familiarizations were presented under different timing conditions that either facilitated or disrupted tem...

In this paper we present research on students’ perceptual modes and their learning activity with respect to use of multimedia learning resources in a virtual learning environment within an online course. The course content is offered in the form of lessons designed in the Moodle course management system. Lessons contain three different types of resources: textual, pictorial resources accompanie...

We present a novel methodology for building highly integrated multimodal systems. Our approach is motivated by current cognitive and behavioral theories of sensory perception in animals and humans. We argue that perceptual integration in multimodal systems needs to happen at the lowest levels of the individual perceptual processes. Rather than treating each modality as a separately processed, i...

Two experiments evaluated the hypothesis that perceptual fluency is used to infer prior occurrence. Subjects heard (Experiment 1) or saw (Experiment 2) a list of words and then were presented in the same modality with both these and other words twice in succession: first in a more or less impoverished fashion, and then in clear fashion. For the first of these two presentations, the subjects tri...

Traditionally, speech perception training paradigms have not adequately taken into account the possibility that there may be modality-specific requirements for perceptual learning with auditory-only (AO) versus visual-only (VO) stimuli. The study reported here investigated hypothesis are differences in how prior information is used by normal-hearing participants during vocoded VO training. Two ...