Is visual/haptic crossmodal representation modality-specific or modality-independent?
Poster Presentation

Simon Lacey
School of Human Sciences & Communication, Southampton Institute, UK

*Christine Campbell
School of Human Sciences & Communication, Southampton Institute, UK

     Abstract ID Number: 28
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 9, 2005

Abstract
Interference techniques have successfully been used to investigate representation in working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) but have only recently been applied to crossmodal memory. The representations underlying visual/haptic crossmodal memory may be modality-specific, either visual (eg Zhang et al., 2004) or haptic (eg Reed et al., 2004), or modality-independent (eg Reales & Ballesteros, 1999). Since spatial information about objects, such as size and shape, can be perceived by both vision and touch (Walker-Andrews, 1994), this study tested these conflicting accounts using visual and haptic, spatial and non-spatial, interference. Participants (N = 180) performed a study-test task with an interference task during encoding. The results showed that interference effects did not depend on modality but on whether or not the interference task was spatial. This suggests that visual/haptic crossmodal memory relies on representations that are spatial and modality-independent rather than modality-specific. Spatial representation has explanatory power since spatial information is available to both vision and touch for both familiar and unfamiliar objects.