Citation

Davis CP, Joergensen GH, Boddy P, Dowling C, Yee E. Psychol. Sci. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Connecticut.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797620910748

PMID

32339068

Abstract

Does the perceptual system for looking at the world overlap with the conceptual system for thinking about it? We conducted two experiments (N = 403) to investigate this question. Experiment 1 showed that when people make simple semantic judgments on words, interference from a concurrent visual task scales in proportion to how much visual experience they have with the things the words refer to. Experiment 2 showed that when people make the same judgments on the very same words, interference from a concurrent manual task scales in proportion to how much manual (but critically, not visual) experience people have with those same things. These results suggest that the meanings of frequently visually experienced things are represented (in part) in the visual system used for actually seeing them, that this visually represented information is a functional part of conceptual knowledge, and that the extent of these visual representations is influenced by visual experience.

Language: en

Keywords

concepts; embodied cognition; interference; open data; open materials; semantic memory; vision