DO VISION AND HAPTICS SHARE COMMON REPRESENTATIONS - IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEMORY WITHIN AND BETWEEN MODALITIES

Previous assessments of verbal cross-modal priming have typically been conducted with the visual and auditory modalities. Within-modal primi ng is always found to be substantially larger than cross-modal priming , a finding that could reflect modality modularity, or alternatively, differences between the coding of visual and auditory verbal informati on (i.e., geometric vs. phonological). The present experiments assesse d implicit and explicit memory within and between vision and haptics, where verbal information could be coded in geometric terms. Because ha ptic perception of words is sequential or letter-by-letter, experiment s were also conducted to isolate the effects of simultaneous versus se quential processing from the manipulation of modality. Together, the r esults reveal no effects of modality change on implicit or explicit te sts. The authors discuss representational similarities between vision and haptics as well as image mediation as possible explanations for th e results.