Visual motion aftereffect from understanding motion language

Abstract

Do people spontaneously form visual mental images when understanding language, and if so, how truly visual are these representations? We test whether processing linguistic descriptions of motion produces sufficiently vivid mental images to cause direction-selective motion adaptation in the visual system (i.e., cause a motion aftereffect illusion). We tested for motion aftereffects (MAEs) following explicit motion imagery, and after processing literal or metaphorical motion language (without instructions to imagine). Intentionally imagining motion produced reliable MAEs. The aftereffect from processing motion language gained strength as people heard more and more of a story (participants heard motion stories in four installments, with a test after each). For the last two story installments, motion language produced reliable MAEs across participants. Individuals differed in how early in the story this effect appeared, and this difference was predicted by the strength of an individual's MAE from imagining motion. Strong imagers (participants who showed the largest MAEs from imagining motion) were more likely to show an MAE in the course of understanding motion language than were weak imagers. The results demonstrate that processing language can spontaneously create sufficiently vivid mental images to produce direction-selective adaptation in the visual system. The timecourse of adaptation suggests that individuals may differ in how efficiently they recruit visual mechanisms in the service of language understanding. Further, the results reveal an intriguing link between the vividness of mental imagery and the nature of the processes and representations involved in language understanding.A good story can draw you in, conjure up a rich visual world, give you goose-bumps, or even make you feel like you were really there. To what extent is hearing a story about something similar to really witnessing it? What is the nature of the representations that arise in the course of normal language processing? Do people spontaneously form visual mental images when understanding language, and if so how truly visual are these representations? In this paper, we make use of the motion aftereffect illusion to test whether processing linguistic descriptions of motion produces sufficiently vivid mental images to cause direction-selective adaptation in the visual system (i.e., cause a motion aftereffect).A number of findings suggest that people do spontaneously engage in imagery during language comprehension, and that processing language affects performance in subsequent perceptual tasks (1-9).What mechanism might underlie these interactions between linguistic processing and perception? The explanation frequently offered is that the representations generated during the course of language comprehension share processing resources with perception, recruiting some of the very same brain regions (10). As evidence for this possibility, neuroimaging [functional MRI (fMRI)] measures have revealed that classically "perceptual" brain areas are recr...

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