Crossmodal correspondences, crossmodal completion and crossmodal imagery

Abstract

Crossmodal correspondences can be defined as tendency to match a sensory feature/dimension, either presented or imagined, to another sensory feature/dimension, either presented or imagined, in another modality. They start to be documented across all modalities (see Spence, 2011 for a review) but both their etiology and role remain to be explored. Crossmodal correspondences, such as those holding between auditory pitch and visual brightness or size have been showed to exert an influence on multisensory perception when two congruent cues are presented together (e.g., Parise and Spence, 2008, 2009). Here, following the framework exposed in Spence and Deroy (in press), I show that crossmodal correspondences can also play two others roles, that is in crossmodal completion and in crossmodal imagery. As such, crossmodal correspondences can explain phenomena such as silent-lip reading or certain aspects of musical imagery that other models want to attribute either to ubiquituous synaesthetic effects (Ward, 2011) or emotional congruence (Palmer et al., 2011).