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Implicit memory is generally supposed to be preserved in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Yet, some implicit priming effects are impaired and others are not. The preserved/impaired priming effects are often interpreted according to the perceptual/conceptual or identification/production distinctions.

Audiovisual interactions for familiar objects are at the core of perception. The nature of these interactions de- pends on the amodal – sensory abstracted – or modal – sensory-dependent – approach of knowledge.

The goal of the present study was to find evidence for a multisensory generalization effect (i.e., generalization from one sensory modality to another sensory modality). The authors used an innovative paradigm (adapted from Brunel, Labeye, Lesourd, & Versace, 2009) involving three phases: a learning phase, consisting in the categorization of geometrical shapes, which manipulated the rules of association between shapes and a sound feature, and two test phases.

Reacting quickly is a crucial ability for survival in many situations. Results in research on forperiod effects show that this ability could be reduced in older people. In these experiments, participants must react as quickly as possible to a presented stimulus.

Résumé. Une question fondamentale concernant l’étude des connaissances en mémoire est de savoir si elles relèvent de différentes natures de connaissances ou si toutes les connaissances sont basées sur des traces sensori-motrices.

The nature of knowledge, i.e. sensory-dependent or abstract, is controversial. Growing evidence supports the existence of sensory-dependent knowledge in young individuals, but this question remains unexplored in elderly individu- als. Thus the first objective of this study was to assess sensory-dependent knowledge in normal aging using a cross-modal priming paradigm.

The aim of this study was to demonstrate that the cross-modal priming effect is perceptual and therefore consistent with the idea that knowledge is modality dependent. We used a two-way cross-modal priming paradigm in two experiments.