Schedule of Events | Symposia

4 trials is not enough: More but not less audio-visual experience strengthens audio-tactile correspondences in children

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Shibo Cao¹ (shibo.cao001@umb.edu), Rong Tan¹, Vivian M Ciaramitaro¹; ¹University of Massachusetts Boston

How do we know what sensory information goes together? Besides spatial co-localization and temporal synchrony, we rely on crossmodal correspondences: how features are shared across the senses. For example, nonsense words, such as "bouba", are associated with round abstract shapes and "kiki" with angular shapes. These associations are seen for auditory and visual stimuli (AV), and auditory and tactile stimuli, which are touched but not seen (AT). Visual experience influences AT associations: AT associations are weak in early-blind adults (Fryer et.al, 2014) and in fully-sighted children with naïve visual experience (Chow et.al, 2021), but can be enhanced if fully-sighted children see the shapes first (16 trials of prior AV exposure; Chow et.al., 2021). Here, we examine if the amount of prior exposure matters. Sixty-one 6-8 year-olds had 4 or 8 trials of prior AV exposure, seeing a round and spiky shape on a screen and indicating which shape best matched a nonsense sound. Following AV exposure, children completed 16 AT trials, feeling two tactile shapes inside a box and indicating which shape best matched a nonsense sound. We found that 8, but not 4, trials of prior AV exposure enhanced AT associations while neither 4 nor 8 trials of prior AT exposure enhanced AT associations. Thus, children did not benefit from repeated AT exposure, unlike blind adults where AT associations are enhanced, or blindfolded, fully-sighted adults where AT associations are diminished (Graven et. al., 2018). Future work needs to address mechanisms by which repeated exposure enhances such crossmodal correspondences.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Multisensory