# Is Audio-Visual Perception Cross Modal or Amodal **Keywords:** audition, vision, multi-sensory perception, crossmodal, amodal **Abstract:** and Keywords Vision allows perception of ordinary material objects; audition, the sources of sounds. Often, perception of objects involves vision and audition—seeing and hearing the perceived things. Perception here is multi-sensory. This chapter addresses how multisensory perception should be understood. It distinguishes two different models for multi-sensory perception—the “cross-modal” model (different senses each represent objects in a modality-specific way), and the “amodal” model (different senses contribute to a single amodal representation of an object)—and asks which model best explains multisensory awareness of objects. It then examines several different kinds of auditory-visual interaction to determine whether any support the amodal model. Although many interactions can be explained by the cross-modal model, some can be explained only by the amodal model suggesting that in some instances multi-sensory perception is amodal. The chapter ends by describing some consequences this might have for understanding auditory perception and perception more generally. Page 1 of 26 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: University of Oxford; date: 24 April 2015 Is Au **Authors:** [[Nudds]]