Does bigger mean louder? Crossmodal congruency and memory judgment

Abstract

Authors have shown that the relation between the perceptual components of the stimulus influences participants’ performance during perceptual categorization task (e.g., speeded classification task, Gallace and Spence, 2006; secondary occurrence judgment, Parise and Spence, 2009). For instance, participants are faster at identifying the size of the stimulus when it is accompanied by a congruent tone (e.g., a small circle presented with a low-pitched tone, see Gallace and Spence, 2006; Evans and Treisman, 2010). This mutual relationship has been formalized as cross-modal congruency and could be observed at both semantic and perceptual levels (for a review see Spence, 2011). However, the role of this cross-modal relation during memory judgment is relatively less established. Brunel and collaborators (2010) shown that during typical size judgment from memory, participants automatically simulate auditory characteristics associated with an object. In their paper, they argued that large objects are more likely to simulate sound, as large objects are often associated with loud noise (i.e., cross-modal correspondence between size and loudness). Here we aimed at demonstrating that during typical size judgment from memory, participants could be influenced by the cross-modal congruency between the typical size of a concept and loudness of an accompanying tone. In our experiment, participants had to judge concept-pictures according to their typical size (i.e., small or large objects). Orthogonally from size manipulation, each picture could be accompanied by a sound (either congruent or incongruent) or not. We found that participants were faster at judging typical object-size in congruent condition compared to the other conditions. This result brings support to Brunel and collaborators’ (2010) statement and provides a piece of evidence toward a cross-modal correspondence between size and loudness.