Categorical congruence facilitates multisensory associative learning.

ABSTRACT: Learning about objects often requires making arbitrary associations among multisensory properties, such as the taste and appearance of a food or the face and voice of a person. However, the multisensory properties of individual objects usually are statistically constrained, such that some properties are more likely to co-occur than others, on the basis of their category. For example, male faces are more likely to co-occur with characteristically male voices than with female voices. Here, we report evidence that these natural multisensory statistics play a critical role in the learning of novel, arbitrary associative pairs. In Experiment 1, we found that learning of pairs consisting of human voices and gender-congruent faces was superior to learning of pairs consisting of human voices and g

SUBMITTER: Barenholtz E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6469507 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature