How does the meaning of a word affect how quickly we can recognize it? Accounts of visual word recognition allow semantic information to facilitate performance but have neglected the role of modality-specific perceptual attention in activating meaning. We predicted that modality-specific semantic information would differentially facilitate lexical decision and reading aloud, depending on how pe...

This report highlights and explores five questions that arose from the workshop on sensory substitution and augmentation at the British Academy, March 26 th through 28th, 2013. 1. Does sensory substitution generate perceptual or cognitive states? Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) deliver information about the environment normally perceived through stimulation in one sensory modality (the " su...

The perceptual modalities associated with property words, such as flicker or click, have previously been demonstrated to affect subsequent property verification judgments (Pecher et al., 2003). Known as the conceptual modality switch effect, this finding supports the claim that brain systems for perception and action help subserve the representation of concepts. The present study addressed the ...

This research uses fMRI to understand the role of eight cortical regions in a relatively complex information-processing task. Modality of input (visual versus auditory) and modality of output (manual versus vocal) are manipulated. Two perceptual regions (auditory cortex and fusiform gyrus) only reflected perceptual encoding. Two motor regions were involved in information rehearsal as well as pr...

Previous neuroimaging studies of perceptual priming have reported priming-related decreases in the extrastriate cortex. However, because these experiments have used visual stimuli, it is unclear whether the observed decreases are associated specifically with some aspect of visual perceptual processing or with more general aspects of priming. We studied within- and cross-modality priming using a...

Subjects saw or heard words in a list (e.g. limerick) and then took two successive tests. The first was a yes/no recognition test in which auditory/visual modality of test words was manipulated orthogonally to the study modality. The second test varied with experimental conditions: subjects produced words to either perceptual (fragment) cues (l- -e-ick) or conceptual cues (What name is given to...

Theories of embodied cognition hold that the conceptual system uses perceptual simulations for the purposes of representation. A strong prediction is that perceptual phenomena should emerge in conceptual processing, and, in support, previous research has shown that switching modalities from one trial to the next incurs a processing cost during conceptual tasks. However, to date, such research h...

How do users generate an illusion of presence in a rich and consistent virtual environment from an impoverished, incomplete, and often inconsistent set of sensory cues? We conducted an experiment to explore how multimodal perceptual cues are integrated into a coherent experience of virtual objects and spaces. SpeciŽcally, we explored whether intermodal integration contributes to generating the ...