The Influence of Language on Perception: Listening to Sentences about Faces Affects the Perception of Faces

Abstract

We examined the effect of linguistic comprehension on early perceptual encoding in a series of electrophysiological and behavioral studies on humans. Using the fact that pictures of faces elicit a robust and reliable evoked response that peaks at ϳ170 ms after stimulus onset (N170), we measured the N170 to faces that were preceded by primes that referred to either faces or scenes. When the primes were auditory sentences, the magnitude of the N170 was larger when the face stimuli were preceded by sentences describing faces compared to sentences describing scenes. In contrast, when the primes were visual, the N170 was smaller after visual primes of faces compared to visual primes of scenes. Similar opposing effects of linguistic and visual primes were also observed in a reaction time experiment in which participants judged the gender of faces. These results provide novel evidence of the influence of language on early perceptual processes and suggest a surprising mechanistic description of this interaction: linguistic primes produce content-specific interference on subsequent visual processing. This interference may be a consequence of the natural statistics of language and vision given that linguistic content is generally uncorrelated with the contents of perception.

Language can boost otherwise unseen objects into visual awareness

“…Conversely, lexical decision times for motion words increased in the presence of congruent visual motion and decreased with incongruent motion (27), suggesting bidirectional influences between linguistic and visual-motion processing. Similar demonstrations have been shown in the domain of contrast sensitivity (28) and face processing (29).…”

Something always sticks? how emotional language modulates neural processes involved in face encoding and recognition memory

“…Mid-latency components such as the EPN/N250 are modulated by the familiarity of faces (Tanaka et al 2006), exhibiting larger amplitudes for familiar and famous faces compared to unknown ones (Herzmann et al 2004). Thus, previously reported emotion effects at early (Landau et al 2010;Righart et al 2005) and mid-latency processing stages (Abdel Rahman 2011;Wieser et al 2014) might have been at least partly due to pre-established familiarity of faces. Here, for the initially unknown faces, new representations had to be created first, and although a baseline phase established some degree of familiarity and amplitudes increased across repetitions, there was no modulation by the type of information presented.…”

“…In sum, extant results demonstrate that both preceding and concurrent language information can directly shape some aspects of scene (McNamara et al 2009) and face perception (Junghöfer et al 2016;Landau et al 2010;Wieser et al 2014). Electrophysiological effects have been documented at early (Landau et al 2010;Righart et al 2005), mid-latency (Abdel Rahman 2011;Junghöfer et al 2016;Wieser et al 2014), and late processing stages (Abdel Rahman 2011;McNamara 2009McNamara , 2011Wieser et al 2014).…”

“…Language not only modulates the processing of concurrently presented stimuli, but may also change the way humans process stimuli following linguistic information, including early stages (N1) of face perception (Landau et al 2010;Righart and de Gelder 2005). Its impact is evident in gossip and the media, where we often learn about other people before actually meeting them or even without ever meeting them.…”

“…Electrophysiological effects have been documented at early (Landau et al 2010;Righart et al 2005), mid-latency (Abdel Rahman 2011;Junghöfer et al 2016;Wieser et al 2014), and late processing stages (Abdel Rahman 2011;McNamara 2009McNamara , 2011Wieser et al 2014). Moreover, memory effects of linguistic emotional contexts have been documented on the neural (Abdel Rahman 2011; Maratos et al 2001aMaratos et al , 2001bMcNamara et al 2011) and on the behavioral level (Mattarozzi et al 2014), although not all neural effects are reflected in explicit memory effects (Johansson et al 2004;Maratos et al 2001aMaratos et al , 2001b).…”