Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory

We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories...

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Main Authors: Vandeberg, Lisa, Eerland, Anita, Zwaan, Rolf A.
Format: Online
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science 2012
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340353/
id pubmed-3340353
recordtype oai_dc
spelling pubmed-33403532012-05-03 Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory Vandeberg, Lisa Eerland, Anita Zwaan, Rolf A. Research Article We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories contained two linguistic manipulations that have been demonstrated to affect concept availability in memory, i.e., object presence and goal-relevance. The results show that described absence of an object caused people to select the most transparent picture more often than described presence of the object. This effect was not moderated by goal-relevance, suggesting that our paradigm tapped into the perceptual quality of representations rather than, for example, their linguistic availability. We discuss the implications of these findings within a framework of grounded cognition. Public Library of Science 2012-04-30 /pmc/articles/PMC3340353/ /pubmed/22558364 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036154 Text en Vandeberg et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type Open Access Journal
institution_category Foreign Institution
institution US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building NCBI PubMed
collection Online Access
language English
format Online
author Vandeberg, Lisa
Eerland, Anita
Zwaan, Rolf A.
spellingShingle Vandeberg, Lisa
Eerland, Anita
Zwaan, Rolf A.
Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory
author_facet Vandeberg, Lisa
Eerland, Anita
Zwaan, Rolf A.
author_sort Vandeberg, Lisa
title Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory
title_short Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory
title_full Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory
title_fullStr Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory
title_full_unstemmed Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Language Affects Perceptual Vividness in Memory
title_sort out of mind, out of sight: language affects perceptual vividness in memory
description We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories contained two linguistic manipulations that have been demonstrated to affect concept availability in memory, i.e., object presence and goal-relevance. The results show that described absence of an object caused people to select the most transparent picture more often than described presence of the object. This effect was not moderated by goal-relevance, suggesting that our paradigm tapped into the perceptual quality of representations rather than, for example, their linguistic availability. We discuss the implications of these findings within a framework of grounded cognition.
publisher Public Library of Science
publishDate 2012
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340353/
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