When performing joint actions, people rely on common ground – shared information that provides the required basis for mutual understanding. Common ground can be based on people's interaction history or on knowledge and expectations people share, e.g., because they belong to the same culture or social class. Here, we suggest that people rely on yet another form of common ground, one that originates in their similarities in multisensory processing. Specifically, we focus on ‘crossmodal correspondences’ – nonarbitrary associations that people make between stimulus features in different sensory modalities, e.g., between stimuli in the auditory and the visual modality such as high-pitched sounds and small objects. Going beyond previous research that focused on investigating crossmodal correspondences in individuals, we propose that people can use these correspondences for communicating and coordinating with others. Initial support for our proposal comes from a communication game played in a public space (an art gallery) by pairs of visitors. We observed that pairs created nonverbal communication systems by spontaneously relying on ‘crossmodal common ground’. Based on these results, we conclude that crossmodal correspondences not only occur within individuals but that they can also be actively used in joint action to facilitate the coordination between individuals.

在执行联合行动时，人们依靠共同点–共享信息为相互理解提供了必要的基础。共同点可以基于人们的互动历史或人们共享的知识和期望，例如，因为他们属于同一文化或社会阶层。在这里，我们建议人们依赖于另一种形式的共同点，一种起源于他们在多感官加工中的相似性。具体而言，我们紧紧围绕“crossmodal对应” -非任意协会，人们在不同的感觉通道，例如刺激特征之间作，在听觉刺激和视觉形式，如之间高亢的声音和小对象。除了以前的研究重点在于研究个人的跨模式通信之外，我们建议人们可以使用这些通信来与他人进行交流和协调。我们提案的最初支持来自成对的访客在公共场所（美术馆）玩的交流游戏。我们观察到，配对通过自发地依靠“跨模态共同点”创建了非语言交流系统。根据这些结果，我们得出结论，跨峰通信不仅发生在个体内部，而且还可以在联合行动中积极使用，以促进个体之间的协调。