The Effect of Implied Orientation Derived from Verbal Context on Picture Recognition

Abstract

Perceptual symbol systems assume an analogue relationship between a symbol and its referent, whereas amodal symbol systems assume an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and its referent. According to perceptual symbol theories, the complete representation of an object, called a simulation, should reflect physical characteristics of the object. Amodal theories, in contrast, do not make this prediction. We tested the hypothesis, derived from perceptual symbol theories, that people mentally represent the orientation of an object implied by a verbal description. Orientation (vertical-horizontal) was manipulated by having participants read a sentence that implicitly suggested a particular orientation for an object. Then recognition latencies to pictures of the object in each of the two orientations were measured. Pictures matching the orientation of the object implied by the sentence were responded to faster than pictures that did not match the orientation. This finding is interpreted as offering support for theories positing perceptual symbol systems.

Moving words: dynamic representations in language comprehension*

“…The findings reported in this article add to the growing body of evidence that language comprehension routinely involves the activation of perceptual representations (Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2003;Richardson et al, 2003;Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001;Zwaan et al, 2002;Zwaan & Yaxley, 2003a, 2003b. However, the current findings constitute an advance over this earlier research in several ways.…”

“…We assume that dynamic mental representations are perceptual traces that are stored as temporal patterns of activation that unfold over time corresponding to a certain perceptual experience. Extending the logic behind the Stanfield and Zwaan (2001) and the Zwaan et al (2002) experiments, we predicted that comprehension of a sentence describing a motion event should facilitate the perception of an analogous visual motion event relative to a mismatching motion event. We tested this idea using sentences such as (1) and (2).…”

“…The assumption that language-like abstract representations, such as propositions, form the building blocks of cognition (e.g., Pylyshyn, 1986) has recently been challenged by re-search demonstrating that people routinely activate perceptual representations during language comprehension-the cognitive skill that intuitively would seem to be the one most likely to involve propositional representations- (Richardson, Spivey, Barsalou, & McRae, 2003;Spivey & Geng, 2001;Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001;Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002;Zwaan & Yaxley, 2003a, 2003b. Importantly, these studies employed implicit tasks, such as recognition or naming, thus demonstrating that perceptual information is routinely activated, even when doing so does not facilitate task performance.…”

Situated sentence processing: The coordinated interplay account and a neurobehavioral model

“…Zwaan, Stanfield, and Yaxley (2002), for example, found that after reading a sentence such as The ranger saw the eagle in the sky participants were faster to judge a picture of an eagle as mentioned versus not mentioned in the sentence when the depicted shape (wings outstretched) matched the shape implied in the sentence (the eagle is in the sky) compared to when it did not match (perched). Stanfield and Zwaan (2001) observed related findings concerning object orientation, while Yaxley and Zwaan (2005) provided evidence that readers simulate even the visibility of described scenes (e.g., as foggy versus clear). The above observations have generally been taken as support for the seamless interaction of visual and linguistic representations (Tanenhaus et al, 1995), on the one hand, and for multi-modal sensorimotor-derived meaning representations on the other (Barsalou, 1999b).…”

Abstract Concepts in Grounded Cognition

“…Furthermore, this last set of studies revealed that words associated with vertical or horizontal space were not enough to lead to interference effects, but that the results were caused by mental imagery. Importantly, building a mental simulation can also facilitate the processing of visually congruent information (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Kaschak et al, 2005;Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001;Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). The critical difference between interference and facilitation seems to be the length of time between the presentation of the linguistic stimulus and the perceptual stimulus.…”