Literature on memory research shows that when memorizing, people may blend two situations, i.e. when memorizing one story, they add elements from another story. Most of the cognitive models assume that the superficial similarity between two episodes is the primary factor for blending. However, there is evidence that people blend dissimilar stories as well, if these stories share the same relational structure. We contrasted the two factors in a single study and performed experiments with the same design and stimuli with adults and with 4-5-year-old children. The results show that there is no qualitative difference between the performance of adults and children. Also, both adults and children blend either pictures that have surface or structural similarity depending on the abstractness of the objects in them.

Crossmodal correspondences are innate, language-based and statistically derived. They occur across all sensory systems and in different cultures. Despite their multiformity, they are exhibited analogously, mainly through robust congruency effects. One plausible explanation is that they rely on a common underlying mechanism, reflecting the fundamental ability to transfer relational patterns across different domains. We investigated the pitch-height correspondence in a bimodal sound-discrimination task, where the context of one relative sound pitch was changed online. The intermediate sound frequency was presented in successive blocks with lower or higher equidistant sounds and two squares at fixed up and down vertical positions. Congruency effects were transferred across sound contexts with ease. The results supported the assumption about the relational basis of the crossmodal associations. In addition, vertical congruency depended critically on the horizontal spatial representations of sound.