Martin Jüttner a1andIngo Rentschler a2 a1 Neuroscience Research Institute, Aston University, Birmingham, B13 9DH United Kingdom a2 Institut für Medizinische Psychologie, Universität München, 80336 Munich, Germany
ingo@imp.med.uni-muenchen.de
Abstract
Spatial objects may not only be perceived visually but also by touch. We report recent experiments investigating to what extent prior object knowledge acquired in either the haptic or visual sensory modality transfers to a subsequent visual learning task. Results indicate that even mental object representations learnt in one sensory modality may attain a multi-modal quality. These findings seem incompatible with picture-based reasoning schemas but leave open the possibility of modality-specific reasoning mechanisms.
