Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies showed that the sequential verification of different sensory modality properties for concepts (e.g.,BLENDER-loud; BANANA-yellow) incurs a processing cost, known as the modality-switch effect (Pecher et al. 2003; 2004).We assessed the influence of the mode of presentation of stimuli on the modality-switch effect in a property verification primingparadigm. Participants were required to perform a property verification task on a target sentence (e.g., “butter is yellowish”,“leaves rustle”) presented either visually or aurally after having been presented with a prime sentence (e.g., “the light is flick-ering”, “the sound is echoing”) that could either share both, one or none of the target’s mode of presentation and contentmodality. Results showed that the presentation and the content-driven effects were not cumulative. We conclude that the MSEis a two-fold effect which can occur at two different levels of information processing (i.e., perceptual and semantic).