A note on crossmodal perception

Motivated by some questions that I received regarding a previous post on this portal (http://cko.dk/gruppeindlaeg/en-unders-gelse-af-den-opfattede-lighed-mellem-korte-s-tninger-og-lydlogoer) I have decided to share some notes and articles on this and related topics.

Crossmodal perception is a phenomenon that describes the interaction between our various sensory modalities in response to multi-modal stimuli. Have a google on the “McGurk effekt” to get a popular and fun introduction to the topic. If you start digging in the literature you will find that the term “crossmodal perception/interaction” is used quite widely to describe anything from synaesthesia, sensory substitution, to associative links on a more explicit level.  This widespread use of the term is not helpful if you want to get an overview, and add quite a bit to the confusion. To get a good starting point I would recommend the following review on the topic:

Ward, J., Huckstep, B., & Tsakanikos, E. (2006). Sound-Colour synaesthesia: To what extent does it use cross-modal mechanisms common to us all? Cortex, 42(2), 264-80.

Even though the article only focuses on sound-colour synaesthesia it does discuss one of the more relevant issues – to what extend is the phenomenon generalizable to the general public? For another perspective on the crossmodal perception/interaction in other sensory modalities see (includes a very good literature review/introduction):

Spence, C., & Gallace, A. (2010). Tasting shapes and words. Food Quality and Preference.

The experiment reported by Spence & Gallace (2007) roughly describes the same topic, which I have reported in the experiment on sound logo/sentence similarity – Are there common perceptions of similarity across a multi modal stimulus set? Admittedly our study focused more on semantic meaning, whereas Spence & Gallace looked at crossmodal correspondence.

Based on recent popular books and focus on the topic from the marketing milieu, I expect that we will see more and more publications and interesting findings on crossmodal perception. I especially (politely) request more focus on the behavioural consequences of using e.g. congruent (from a crossmodal perspective) stimuli e.g. a marketing context.

As and end note I would like refer interested readers to Michael Haverkamp’s webpage, which has (freely available) articles on the topic of synesthetic design in the audio/visual domain.

http://www.michaelhaverkamp.de/synaesthesie.htm