CROSS-MODAL COMPATIBILITY EFFECTS WITH VISUAL-SPATIAL AND AUDITORY VERBAL STIMULUS AND RESPONSE SETS

Within the visual-spatial and auditory-verbal modalities, reaction tim es to a stimulus have been shown to be faster if salient features of t he stimulus and response sets correspond than if they do not. Accounts that attribute such stimulus-response compatibility effects to genera l translation processes predict that similar effects should occur for cross-modal stimulus and response sets. To test this prediction, three experiments were conducted examining four-choice reactions with (1) v isual spatial-location stimuli assigned to speech responses, (2) speec h stimuli assigned to keypress responses, and (3) symbolic visual stim uli assigned to speech responses. In all the experiments, responses we re faster when correpondence between salient features of the stimulus and response sets was maintained, demonstrating that similar principle s of translation operate both within and across modalities.