An Implicit Association Test on Audio-­Visual Cross-­Modal Correspondences

Abstract

Automatic connections between sounds and visual shapes have been documented for some time (c.f., Spence, 2011). We replicated audiovisual correspondences with simple linguistic sounds /i/ and /u/, this time produced in the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, using a modified version of the implicit association test (IAT). Although congruent blocks were significantly faster than incongruent ones (p < .001), no effect of tone congruence was observed. Since tone was an unattended stimulus dimension, we argue that attention modulates sensory congruence in implicit association tasks of this nature.