Concepts are not represented by conscious imagery

Pecher, Diane; Dantzig, Saskia van; Schifferstein, Hendrik N.J.

doi:10.3758/pbr.16.5.914

Cited by 34 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…This indicates that mental representations constructed during language comprehension are highly specified in terms of perceptually based information, i.e., the mental representation of an event incorporates information that is not explicitly encoded in the input, but which is available from experience. Numerous studies report similar findings for other perceptual dimensions such as shape, orientation and color information (see Zwaan and Pecher, 2012 for a discussion and recent replication experiments), and provide additional evidence that representations are constructed incrementally (Sato et al, 2013), unconsciously (Pecher et al, 2009a; Vukovic and Williams, 2014) and are not driven by task dependent strategies (Pecher et al, 2009b). In contrast to more traditional views of concepts as amodal and abstract entities, perception-based accounts typically envision conceptual representation as a dynamic simulation process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Experience-Based Probabilities Modulate Expectations in a Gender-Coded Artificial Language

Öttl

Behne

2016

Front. Psychol.

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The current study combines artificial language learning with visual world eyetracking to investigate acquisition of representations associating spoken words and visual referents using morphologically complex pseudowords. Pseudowords were constructed to consistently encode referential gender by means of suffixation for a set of imaginary figures that could be either male or female. During training, the frequency of exposure to pseudowords and their imaginary figure referents were manipulated such that a given word and its referent would be more likely to occur in either the masculine form or the feminine form, or both forms would be equally likely. Results show that these experience-based probabilities affect the formation of new representations to the extent that participants were faster at recognizing a referent whose gender was consistent with the induced expectation than a referent whose gender was inconsistent with this expectation. Disambiguating gender information available from the suffix did not mask the induced expectations. Eyetracking data provide additional evidence that such expectations surface during online lexical processing. Taken together, these findings indicate that experience-based information is accessible during the earliest stages of processing, and are consistent with the view that language comprehension depends on the activation of perceptual memory traces.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Experience-Based Probabilities Modulate Expectations in a Gender-Coded Artificial Language

Öttl

Behne

2016

Front. Psychol.

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“…In conceptual-processing research, this idea has previously been rejected because of the absence of correlations between the size of the modality-switch effect discussed in our introduction (Pecher et al, 2003) and visual-imagery measures (Pecher, van Dantzig, & Schifferstein, 2009). In the present study, we took an experimental approach, and our results support the involvement of imagery.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object Shape and Orientation Do Not Routinely Influence Performance During Language Processing

2013

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The role of visual representations during language processing remains unclear: They could be activated as a necessary part of the comprehension process, or they could be less crucial and influence performance in a task-dependent manner. In the present experiments, participants read sentences about an object. The sentences implied that the object had a specific shape or orientation. They then either named a picture of that object (Experiments 1 and 3) or decided whether the object had been mentioned in the sentence (Experiment 2). Orientation information did not reliably influence performance in any of the experiments. Shape representations influenced performance most strongly when participants were asked to compare a sentence with a picture or when they were explicitly asked to use mental imagery while reading the sentences. Thus, in contrast to previous claims, implied visual information often does not contribute substantially to the comprehension process during normal reading.

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“…This will result in a longer reaction time and/or a lower accuracy, similar to modality-switching costs in perceptual tasks (Spence, Nicholls, & Driver, 2001). Conceptual modality-switch effects have been found in various property-verification studies (e.g., Marques, 2006; Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2003; Pecher, Van Dantzig, & Schifferstein, 2009; Vermeulen, Corneille & Niedenthal, 2008). Other studies demonstrated direct interactions between conceptual processing and perceptual processing, providing even stronger evidence for the theory that the sensory-motor system is involved in conceptual representation (Van Dantzig, Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2008; Vermeulen et al, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

A sharp image or a sharp knife: norms for the modality-exclusivity of 774 concept-property items

et al. 2010

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According to recent embodied cognition theories, mental concepts are represented by modality-specific sensory-motor systems. Much of the evidence for modality-specificity in conceptual processing comes from the property-verification task. When applying this and other tasks, it is important to select items based on their modality-exclusivity. We collected modality ratings for a set of 387 properties, each of which was paired with two different concepts, yielding a total of 774 concept-property items. For each item, participants rated the degree to which the property could be experienced through five perceptual modalities (vision, audition, touch, smell, and taste). Based on these ratings, we computed a measure of modality exclusivity, the degree to which a property is perceived exclusively through one sensory modality. In this paper, we briefly sketch the theoretical background of conceptual knowledge, discuss the use of the property-verification task in cognitive research, provide our norms and statistics, and validate the norms in a memory experiment. We conclude that our norms are important for researchers studying modality-specific effects in conceptual processing.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13428-010-0038-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Concepts are not represented by conscious imagery

Cited by 34 publications

References 27 publications

Experience-Based Probabilities Modulate Expectations in a Gender-Coded Artificial Language

Experience-Based Probabilities Modulate Expectations in a Gender-Coded Artificial Language

Object Shape and Orientation Do Not Routinely Influence Performance During Language Processing

A sharp image or a sharp knife: norms for the modality-exclusivity of 774 concept-property items

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