Mental representation in visual/haptic crossmodal memory: evidence from interference effects

Abstract

Two experiments used visual-, verbal-, and haptic-interference tasks during encoding (Experiment 1) and retrieval (Experiment 2) to examine mental representation of familiar and unfamiliar objects in visual/haptic crossmodal memory. Three competing theories are discussed, which variously suggest that these representations are: (a) visual; (b) dual-code—visual for unfamiliar objects but visual and verbal for familiar objects; or (c) amodal. The results suggest that representations of unfamiliar objects are primarily visual but that crossmodal memory for familiar objects may rely on a network of different representations. The pattern of verbal-interference effects suggests that verbal strategies facilitate encoding of unfamiliar objects regardless of modality, but only haptic recognition regardless of familiarity. The results raise further research questions about all three theoretical approaches.

Acknowledgments

This research forms part of the first author's doctoral thesis under the supervision of the second author and is supported by a bursary from Southampton Solent University.

We thank Alex McKee, Southampton Solent University, for programming the visual-interference task. We also thank Dudley Thorpe and Ben Thorpe of Dragon Caving Gear, Abercraf, for help in selecting the unfamiliar-object set. The extract from The Finance Act 1998 (Chartered Institute of Taxation, 1998) is used by kind permission of Butterworths, a division of Reed Elsevier (UK) Limited, under licence PN1690. Part of these data were presented at the British Psychological Society XX Annual Cognitive Section Conference, University of Reading, 3–5 September, 2003. We thank Dr Graham Dean, Southampton Solent University, Dr Michel Denis, Université de Paris-Sud, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

In this paper, we use “visual/haptic” to refer to the crossmodal process generally whilst “visual–haptic” and “haptic–visual” refer to the specific modality conditions, the encoding modality being followed by the retrieval modality in each case.