Visual and auditory object recognition in relation to spatial ability.

The domain-general ability to recognize objects at the subordinate level (o) is most often tested in the visual modality. However, previous work has evidenced a strong relationship between visual and auditory o abilities, suggesting that o may be multimodal. We measured this relationship using a structural equation modeling approach. We found a strong relationship (r = .79) between visual and auditory o. There were similarly strong relationships between spatial ability and both visual (r = .73) and auditory (r = .63) o. When the shared influence of general ability was controlled for, the relationship between visual and auditory o remained substantial (r = .61), while relationships between spatial ability and visual (r = .31) and auditory o (r = .05) were nonsignificant. These results suggest that individual differences in object recognition are largely multimodal and that the relationship between o and spatial ability is not clearly independent of general ability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).