Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Previous research has found that there is an inherent association between auditory and visual dimensions such as the height a pitch and the size of an object. From this, researchers have assumed that such audiovisual correspondences must result solely from bottom-up processing. In a series of studies, we sought to separate bottom-up and top-down effects in the correspondence between pitch and visual size, elevation, spatial frequency, brightness, and sharpness. Using a modified speeded classification task, we asked participants to pair audiovisual dimensions in “compatible” (e.g., high pitch/small circle) and “incompatible” (e.g., high pitch/large circle) conditions. We compared their reaction times across conditions and found that in most cases participants can pair the dimensions in either direction with similar speed and accuracy. We conclude that top-down effects such as task instructions and language knowledge do influence the strength of audiovisual associations. We thus strongly question the assumption of automaticity prevalent in the cross-modal correspondence literature.</jats:p>