Language in the Mind's Eye: Visual Representations and Language Processing

My favorite children’s book was (and still is) Matilda, by Roald Dahl. The story is about Matilda Wormwood, an extraordinarily clever and sweet five year old girl who loves to learn and read. Unfortunately, her unpleasant parents are contemptuous of her inquisitiveness and talent, as is the headmistress of her school, Miss Trunchbull. While Matilda’s parents force her to eat microwave dinners and watch loud game shows on TV, the child-hating Miss Trunchbull sows fear by locking children up in a device called the Chokey (a claustrophobic closet with spikes perforating the walls) or launching them across the schoolyard after swirling them around by their braids. Then, Matilda finds out she has psychokinetic powers and decides to use them to teach her parents and headmistress a lesson. The magic of this book was that it made me feel like being drawn away from reality and into Matilda’s world: I could feel her eagerness to learn and her frustration with her parents, I could see her father’s face and hear him shouting when she super-glued his hat to his head, and I envisioned what it looked like when she used her special powers to make crayons fly and write messages on a chalkboard to scare the life out of Miss Trunchbull. How is this possible? How can abstract symbols such as letters and words on a page come to life, engage you, create vivid images, and make you feel like you experience the described events yourself

Out of mind, out of sight: Language affects perceptual vividness in memory

We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories contained two linguistic manipulations that have been demonstrated to affect concept availability in memory, i.e., object presence and goal-relevance. The results show that described absence of an object caused people to select the most transparent picture more often than described presence of the object. This effect was not moderated by goal-relevance, suggesting that our paradigm tapped into the perceptual quality of representations rather than, for example, their linguistic availability. We discuss the implications of these findings within a framework of grounded cognition

The Fit Factor: The Role of Fit Between Ads in Understanding Cross-Media Synergy

This research investigates the role of fit between campaign ads in generating cross-media effects. Using an ecologically valid design, this article enhances our understanding of cross-media effects in real life. By combining a content analysis of Dutch cross-media campaigns with a secondary data analysis of tracking studies on the same campaigns (n = 900), this research revealed that fit contributed positively to campaign evaluations yet contributed negatively to brand and campaign memory. In conclusion, this research shows that fit is an important factor in understanding cross-media synergy but might have both positive and negative effects