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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2012
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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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1611526005619425280 |