How Does Language Change Perception: A Cautionary Note

The relationship of language, perception, and action has been the focus of recent studies exploring the representation of conceptual knowledge. A substantial literature has emerged, providing ample demonstrations of the intimate relationship between language and perception. The appropriate characterization of these interactions remains an important challenge. Recent evidence involving visual search tasks has led to the hypothesis that top-down input from linguistic representations may sharpen visual feature detectors, suggesting a direct influence of language on early visual perception. We present two experiments to explore this hypothesis. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the benefits of linguistic priming in visual search may arise from a reduction in the demands on working memory. Experiment 2 presents a situation in which visual search performance is disrupted by the automatic activation of irrelevant linguistic representations, a result consistent with the idea that linguistic and sensory representations interact at a late, response-selection stage of processing. These results raise a cautionary note: While language can influence performance on a visual search, the influence need not arise from a change in perception per se

Improved control of exogenous attention in action video game players

Action video game players (VGPs) have demonstrated a number of attentional advantages over non-players. Here, we propose that many of those benefits might be underpinned by improved control over exogenous (i.e., stimulus-driven) attention. To test this we used an anti-cueing task, in which a sudden-onset cue indicated that the target would likely appear in a separate location on the opposite side of the fixation point. When the time between the cue onset and the target onset was short (40 ms), non-players (nVGPs) showed a typical exogenous attention effect. Their response times were faster to targets presented at the cued (but less probable) location compared with the opposite (more probable) location. VGPs, however, were less likely to have their attention drawn to the location of the cue. When the onset asynchrony was long (600 ms), VGPs and nVGPs were equally able to endogenously shift their attention to the likely (opposite) target location. In order to rule out processing-speed differences as an explanation for this result, we also tested VGPs and nVGPs on an attentional blink (AB) task. In a version of the AB task that minimized demands on task switching and iconic memory, VGPs and nVGPs did not differ in second target identification performance (i.e., VGPs had the same magnitude of AB as nVGPs), suggesting that the anti-cueing results were due to flexible control over exogenous attention rather than to more general speed-of-processing differences

Serial dependence in the perceptual judgments of radiologists

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Yuki Murai for helpful comments on data analysis. Funding This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship P2ELP3_158876 (M.M.) and the National Institutes of Health Grant R01 CA236793Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Dissecting Visual Attention

The study of attention had a prominent place at the birth of psychology as a scientific discipline. Wundt devoted the first chapter of his Einfuhrung in die Psychologie (Introduction to Psychology) to attention. Wundt commented, fo