Crossmodal correspondence of natural amplitude modulations

Abstract

Crossmodal correspondence is the ability to recognize objects from different sensory modalities to be similar. Here, we investigated the capacity of humans to perform crossmodal discriminations between visual, acoustic, and tactile stimuli modulated in amplitudes of low-pass filtered envelopes obtained from natural sounds. We found that the perception of crossmodal correspondence emerged from the number of amplitude prominences in each stimulus rather than from temporal variations. Therefore, we propose saliency as the supramodal trade coin of temporal modulations.