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Local and Global Cross-Modal Influences Between Vision and Hearing, Tasting, Smelling, or Touching

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

April 2011
140(3):364-389

Source
PubMed

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It is suggested that the distinction between global versus local processing styles exists across sensory modalities. Activation of one-way of processing in one modality should affect processing styles in a different modality. In 12 studies, auditory, haptic, gustatory or olfactory global versus local processing was induced, and participants were tested with a measure of their global versus local visual attention; the content of this measure was unrelated to the inductions. In a different set of 4 studies, the effect of local versus global visual processing on the way people listen to a poem or touch, taste, and smell objects was examined. In all experiments, global/local processing in 1 modality shifted to global/local processing in the other modality. A final study found more pronounced shifts when compatible processing styles were induced in 2 rather than 1 modality. Moreover, the study explored mediation by relative right versus left hemisphere activation as measured with the line bisection task and accessibility of semantic associations. It is concluded that the effects reflect procedural rather than semantic priming effects that occurred out of participants' awareness. Because global/local processing has been shown to affect higher order processing, future research may activate processing styles in other sensory modalities to produce similar effects. Furthermore, because global/local processing is triggered by a variety of real world variables, one may explore effects on other sensory modalities than vision. The results are consistent with the global versus local processing model, a systems account (GLOMOsys; Förster & Dannenberg, 2010).

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Local and Global Cross-Modal Influences Between Vision and Hearing,

Tasting, Smelling, or Touching

Jens Förster

University of Amsterdam

It is suggested that the distinction between global versus local processing styles exists across sensory

modalities. Activation of one-way of processing in one modality should affect processing styles in a

different modality. In 12 studies, auditory, haptic, gustatory or olfactory global versus local processing

was induced, and participants were tested with a measure of their global versus local visual attention; the

content of this measure was unrelated to the inductions. In a different set of 4 studies, the effect of local

versus global visual processing on the way people listen to a poem or touch, taste, and smell objects was

examined. In all experiments, global/local processing in 1 modality shifted to global/local processing in

the other modality. A final study found more pronounced shifts when compatible processing styles were

induced in 2 rather than 1 modality. Moreover, the study explored mediation by relative right versus left

hemisphere activation as measured with the line bisection task and accessibility of semantic associations.

It is concluded that the effects reflect procedural rather than semantic priming effects that occurred out

of participants’ awareness. Because global/local processing has been shown to affect higher order

processing, future research may activate processing styles in other sensory modalities to produce similar

effects. Furthermore, because global/local processing is triggered by a variety of real world variables, one

may explore effects on other sensory modalities than vision. The results are consistent with the global

versus local processing model, a systems account (GLOMO

sys

; Förster & Dannenberg, 2010).

Keywords: processing styles, procedural priming, sense modalities, multisensory interactions

People can attend to the same event in different ways. They can,

for example, attend to an object by zooming out and paying

attention to its entire figure or by zooming in and paying attention

to its details. As the proverb says, people can look at the forest or

at the trees. In psychological terms, people can use different

processing styles (Schooler, 2002). When using a global process-

ing style, people attend to the whole, or the gestalt, of a stimulus

set, whereas when using a local processing style, they attend to its

details (Navon, 1977). The distinction between holistic (i.e.,

global) and elemental (i.e., local) approaches was captured long

ago in philosophy (Kant, 1781/1969) and psychology (N. H. An-

derson, 1981; Asch, 1946; Witkin, Dyk, & Faterson, 1962).

In recent times, a more systematic investigation of global versus

local perception started with Navon’s (1977) letter task. To exam-

ine the global dominance hypothesis (predicting that people, by

default, look for the forest rather than the trees), he presented

participants with large letters that were made up of small letters

(see Figure 1) and showed that participants were faster to identify

the global target letters than the local target letters. While research-

ers have challenged the global dominance hypothesis and offered

various theoretical models explaining the effect (Kimchi, 1992;

Kinchla & Wolfe, 1979; Lamb & Robertson, 1990; Love, Rouder,

& Wisniewski, 1999), global versus local processing has generated

an abundance of research investigating both its moderators and its

effects (see Förster & Dannenberg, 2010, for a recent overview).

Global and local processing are basic types of perception that

can be triggered by a variety of variables. Those variables have

been identified across disciplines. Within personality and clinical

psychology, for example, pronounced global processing (as, e.g.,

measured with Navon’s, 1977, letter task) has been shown when

people have lower levels of chronic obsessionality (Yovel, Rev-

elle, & Mineka, 2005), lower levels of autism (Wang, Mottron,

Peng, Berthiaume, & Dawson, 2007), or lower levels of anxiety

(Mikulincer, Kedem, & Paz, 1990). Brain research suggests that

global processing is enhanced when participants’ right cerebral

hemisphere is more activated than their left hemisphere (Derry-

berry & Tucker, 1994; Mihov, Denzler, & Förster, 2010; Tucker &

Williamson, 1984; see also Ivry & Robertson, 1998). Social psy-

chologists focusing on self-regulation have shown pronounced

global processing when people think of psychologically distal

versus proximal events (Liberman & Förster, 2009), when they

think about their ideals compared with their duties or security

related issues (Förster & Higgins, 2005), when they are exposed to

unfamiliar as opposed to familiar events (Förster, 2009a; Förster,

Liberman, & Shapira, 2009), or when obstacles are standing in the

way of pursuing a goal (Marguc, Förster, & van Kleef, 2010).

This article was published Online First April 11, 2011.

I thank Jasmien Khattab, Radboud Dam, Pieter Verhoeven, Aga Bojar-

ska, Alexandra Vulpe, Anna Rebecca Sukkau, Basia Pietrawska, Elena

Tsankova, Gosia Skorek, Hana Fleissigova, Inga Schulte-Bahrenberg, Kira

Grabner, Konstantin Mihov, Laura Dannenberg, Maria Kordonowska,

Nika Yugay, Regina Bode, Rodica Damian, Rytis Vitkauskas, Janina

Marguc, Kevin Meier, and Sarah Horn, who served as experimenters and

raters in the different experiments. Special thanks go to Markus Denzler for

invaluable discussions and to Sarah Horn for editing a draft of this article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jens

Förster, Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam,

Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail:

j.a.forster@uva.nl

2011, Vol. 140, No. 3, 364–389 0096-3445/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0023175

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