Flexible and abstract resolutions to crossmodal conflicts

Participants judged whether two sequential visual events were presented for the same length of time or for different lengths of time, while ignoring two irrelevant sequential sounds. Sounds could be either the same or different in terms of their duration or their pitch. When the visual stimuli were in conflict with the sound stimuli (e.g., visual events were the same, but the sounds were different) performance declined. This was true whether sounds varied in duration or in pitch. The influence of sounds was eliminated when visual duration discriminations were made easier. Together these results demonstrate that resolutions to crossmodal conflicts are flexible across the neural and cognitive architectures. More importantly, they suggest that interactions between modalities can span to abstract levels of same/different representations.