title: The Multilevel Modality-Switch Effect: What Happens When We See the Bees Buzzing and Hear the Diamonds Glistening.
abstract: Previous studies demonstrated that the sequential verification of different sensory modality properties for concepts (e.g., BLENDER-loud; BANANA-yellow) brings about a processing cost, known as the modality-switch effect. We report an experiment designed to assess the influence of the mode of presentation (i.e., visual, aural) of stimuli on the modality-switch effect in a property verification and lexical decision priming paradigm. Participants were required to perform a property verification or a lexical decision task on a target sentence (e.g., "a BEE buzzes", "a DIAMOND glistens") presented either visually or aurally after having been presented with a prime sentence (e.g., "the LIGHT is flickering", "the SOUND is echoing") that could either share both, one or none of the target's mode of presentation and content modality. Results show that the mode of presentation of stimuli affects the conceptual modality-switch effect. Furthermore, the depth of processing required by the task modulates the complex interplay of perceptual and semantic information. We conclude that the MSE is a task-related, multilevel effect which can occur on two different levels of information processing (i.e., perceptual and semantic).
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy. elisa.scerrati@unibo.it.
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Scerrati
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
authors.forename: Luisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lugli
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Nicoletti
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.|Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council, Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Anna Maria
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Borghi
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003071:Cognition; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011897:Random Allocation; D060865:Repetition Priming; D012660:Semantics; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Lexical decision task; Modality-switch effect; Priming paradigm; Property verification task