Root versus roof: automatic activation of location information during word processing

Lachmair, Martin; Dudschig, Carolin; Filippis, Mónica De; Vega, Irmgard de la; Kaup, Barbara

doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0158-x

Cited by 72 publications

(182 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Taken together, those results support that direction-associates verbs interfere with manual keypress response, even if the task does not require the participants to lexically access the words meaning. These results are in line with the findings of a recent study employing nouns (Lachmair, Dudschig, De Filippis, de la Vega, & Kaup, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Do task-irrelevant direction-associated motion verbs affect action planning? Evidence from a Stroop paradigm

et al. 2012

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Does simply seeing a word such as rise activate upward responses? The present study is concerned with bottom-up activation of motion-related experiential traces. Verbs referring to an upward or downward motion (e.g., rise/fall) were presented in one of four colors. Participants had to perform an upward or downward hand movement (Experiments 1 and 2a/2b) or a stationary up or down located keypress response (Experiment 3) according to font color. In all experiments, responding was faster if the word's immanent motion direction matched the response (e.g., upward/up response in case of rise); however, this effect was strongest in the experiments requiring an actual upward or downward response movement (Experiments 1 and 2a/2b). These findings suggest bottom-up activation of motionrelated experiential traces, even if the task does not demand lexical access or focusing on a word's meaning.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Do task-irrelevant direction-associated motion verbs affect action planning? Evidence from a Stroop paradigm

et al. 2012

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“…Since the RP did not require participants to recall peripheral features, the fact that memory impairment for locations was observed indicates that these features were activated together with the items during RP, and as a consequence, they were also affected by inhibition. This is consistent with recent literature that has shown automatic activation of peripheral information, such as location, when processing words and objects (e.g., Lachmair et al, 2011) and extends the previous findings by showing that location information is not only activated when processing the identities of the words and objects, but is also inhibited when the memory traces of the words compete during selective retrieval.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Incidental retrieval-induced forgetting of location information

2012

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Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) has been studied with different types of tests and materials. However, RIF has always been tested on the items' central features, and there is no information on whether inhibition also extends to peripheral features of the events in which the items are embedded. In two experiments, we specifically tested the presence of RIF in a task in which recall of peripheral information was required. After a standard retrieval practice task oriented to item identity, participants were cued with colors (Exp. 1) or with the items themselves (Exp. 2) and asked to recall the screen locations where the items had been displayed during the study phase. RIF for locations was observed after retrieval practice, an effect that was not present when participants were asked to read instead of retrieving the items. Our findings provide evidence that peripheral location information associated with an item during study can be also inhibited when the retrieval conditions promote the inhibition of more central, item identity information.Keywords Retrieval-induced forgetting . Inhibition . Memory for location . Covert cuing Our memories are assumed to consist of multimodal attributes of the entities that we experienced in the past, including contextual information of various kinds (Barsalou, 1999). Thus, when we recall a past experience, we not only retrieve individual entities such as objects, people, or words, but also peripheral information associated with the particular experience with that entity. Thus, if we think of the last class we taught, we may recall the question that a particular student asked, but also the place where this student sat in the class or the fact that it was early in the afternoon. A general conception of how the memory system is able to automatically encode spatial, temporal, and frequency information was advanced by Hasher and Zacks (1979), and subsequent studies have provided more specific corroborating evidence, particularly in regard to the encoding of location information. For example, Köhler, Moscovitch, and Melo (2001), in an incidental-learning task for object locations, found that making judgments on attributes related to object identity enhanced memory performance not only when the identity of the objects was tested, but also when the retrieval task tested memory for the object locations. Similarly, Lachmair, Dudschig, De Fillippis, de la Vega, and Kaup (2011) showed that location information was activated when processing words. They asked their participants to perform lexical tasks on concepts that referred to entities associated with an up or down location (e.g., ROOF and ROOT). The results showed that responding was faster when the responses (e.g., the positions of the response keys) were congruent with the locations on the object to which they were related (e.g., ROOF above ROOT). This suggests that spatial location is automatically bound to item identity and is accessed when retrieving words and objects.In the present article, we aim to further illuminate...

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“…Crucially, it provides the opportunity to keep the task the same regardless of whether participants are presented with words in context, or in isolation. To this end, we use a novel approach that combines the comprehension of a written discourse with a variant of the affect-movement compatibility task, in which participants produce approach-avoidance movements to an affect-irrelevant stimulus dimension (word colour) by pushing or pulling a lever (see Kaup, 2011, andBrookshire, Ivry, &Casasanto, 2010, for a related paradigm). As participants are not explicitly asked to evaluate the emotional content of the text, a goalindependent affect-movement compatibility effect would be demonstrated by faster pull than push responses to positive materials and faster push than pull responses to negative materials.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When language gets emotional: Irony and the embodiment of affect in discourse

2015

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Although there is increasing evidence to suggest that language is grounded in perception and action, the relationship between language and emotion is less well understood. We investigate the grounding of language in emotion using a novel approach that examines the relationship between the comprehension of a written discourse and the performance of affect-related motor actions (hand movements towards and away from the body). Results indicate that positively and negatively valenced words presented in context influence motor responses (Experiment 1), whilst valenced words presented in isolation do not (Experiment 3). Furthermore, whether discourse context indicates that an utterance should be interpreted literally or ironically can influence motor responding, suggesting that the grounding of language in emotional states can be influenced by discourse-level factors (Experiment 2). In addition, the finding of affect-related motor responses to certain forms of ironic language, but not to non-ironic control sentences, suggests that phrasing a message ironically may influence the emotional response that is elicited.

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Root versus roof: automatic activation of location information during word processing

Cited by 72 publications

References 12 publications

Do task-irrelevant direction-associated motion verbs affect action planning? Evidence from a Stroop paradigm

Do task-irrelevant direction-associated motion verbs affect action planning? Evidence from a Stroop paradigm

Incidental retrieval-induced forgetting of location information

When language gets emotional: Irony and the embodiment of affect in discourse

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