The perceptual nature of audiovisual interactions for semantic knowledge in young and elderly adults

•The nature of audiovisual interactions was assessed in young and elderly adults.•A cross-modal priming paradigm combined with a meaningless mask was used.•The mask interfered with semantically related items but facilitated those unrelated.•Specific perceptual interference supports perceptual audiovisual interactions.•Young and elderly adults present knowledge grounded in the sensorimotor system.

Audiovisual interactions for familiar objects are at the core of perception. The nature of these interactions depends on the amodal – sensory abstracted – or modal – sensory-dependent – approach of knowledge. According to these approaches, the interactions should be respectively semantic and indirect or perceptual and direct. This issue is therefore a central question to memory and perception, yet the nature of these interactions remains unexplored in young and elderly adults. We used a cross-modal priming paradigm combined with a visual masking procedure of half of the auditory primes. The data demonstrated similar results in the young and elderly adult groups. The mask interfered with the priming effect in the semantically congruent condition, whereas the mask facilitated the processing of the visual target in the semantically incongruent condition. These findings indicate that audiovisual interactions are perceptual, and support the grounded cognition theory.