Six experiments demonstrated cross-modal influences from the auditory modality on the visual modality at an early level of perceptual organization. Participants had to detect a visual target in a rapidly changing sequence of visual distractors. A high tone embedded in a sequence of low tones improved detection of a synchronously presented visual target (Experiment 1), but the effect disappeared...

Recent work has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate and appear to share the same attentional mechanisms. However, this work has been largely limited to the conceptual processing of unimodal properties (i.e., that involve information from only one sensory modality) even though most perceptual properties are actually multimodal (i.e.,...

High perceptual load in a task is known to reduce the visual perception of unattended items (e.g., Lavie, Beck, & Konstantinou, 2014). However, it remains an open question whether perceptual load in one modality (e.g., vision) can affect the detection of stimuli in another modality (e.g., hearing). We report four experiments that establish that high visual perceptual load leads to reduced detec...

Mechanisms of attention are required to prioritise goal-relevant sensory events under conditions of stimulus competition. According to the perceptual load model of attention, the extent to which task-irrelevant inputs are processed is determined by the relative demands of discriminating the target: the more perceptually demanding the target task, the less unattended stimuli will be processed. A...

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 modalityspecific perceptual attention in activating meaning. We predicted that modality-specific semantic information would differentially facilitate lexical decision and reading aloud, depending on how per...

Two experiments were conducted that examined information-integration and rule-based category learning using stimuli that contained auditory and visual information. Results suggest that it is easier to perceptually integrate information within these sensory modalities than across modalities. Conversely, it is easier to perform a disjunctive rule-based task when information comes from different s...

We present a sceptical view of multimodal multistability--drawing most of our examples from the relation between audition and vision. We begin by summarizing some of the principal ways in which audio-visual binding takes place. We review the evidence that unambiguous stimulation in one modality may affect the perception of a multistable stimulus in another modality. Cross-modal influences of on...

Conceptual processing relies on the perceptual system, and, as such, perception affects conception. Many studies have demonstrated perceptual-conceptual interference, where perceptual stimulation in a particular modality leads to slower and/or less accurate conceptual processing of information from the same modality (e.g., Kaschak et al., 2005, 2006; Vermeulen et al., 2008). However, many other...