Connecting Crossmodal Perception and Garner's Integrality: An Investigation into Crossmodal Correspondences using General Recognition Theory

The study of crossmodal (CM) correspondences has identified a large number of associations between stimulus dimensions from different sense modalities, but the processes behind these associations remain unclear. Seven CM correspondences were tested using General Recognition Theory; the results indicated a consistent pattern of perceptual dependence, which suggested that the perceptual system is aware of CM congruency and that the results of prior experiments are not exclusively caused by response biases. Further tests indicated that some correspondences produced an increase in the discriminability of multimodal stimuli when the stimulus components were aligned. Collectively, the results illustrate an unexpected amount of variability in the behavior of different CM correspondences, which demonstrates the inadequacy of current theoretical accounts of these phenomena.