Natural cross-modal mappings between visual and auditory features

The brain may combine information from different sense modalities to enhance the speed and accuracy of detection of objects and events, and the choice of appropriate responses. There is mounting evidence that perceptual experiences that appear to be modality-specific are also influenced by activity from other sensory modalities, even in the absence of awareness of this interaction. In a series of speeded classification tasks, we found spontaneous mappings between the auditory feature of pitch and the visual features of vertical location, size, and spatial frequency but not contrast. By dissociating the task variables from the features that were cross-modally related, we find that the interactions happen in an automatic fashion and are possibly located at the perceptual level.