Lupyan, G.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Beyond making linguistic communication possible, words (verbal labels) affect nonverbal cognitive processes such as categorization, memory, and cognitive control. Can simply hearing a word also affect visual processing, and if so, how deep do such effects go? I will present findings from a variety of paradigms showing that verbal labels modulate ongoing perceptual processing even in low-level visual tasks such as simple object detection. Hearing a label can un-suppress an object made invisible through continuous flash suppression or backward masking (increasing visual sensitivity). Hearing an entirely redundant verbal label also facilitates the deployment of attention to all objects on a screen that match the label, in parallel. The long-term experience of using words in a referential manner appears to make them particularly effective in activating visual representations of the denoted object category. I will show a series of results comparing verbal and nonverbal cues in activating visual information, showing that controlling for familiarity, verbal cues activate visual information more effectively than nonverbal cues. This verbal advantage appears to arise because representations activated by verbal means are more categorical and more similar from subject to subject than representations activated without the overt use of language.In sum, performance on a wide range of visual tasks-tasks that have been presumed to be immune from linguistic influence-is in fact deeply affected by language. I will argue that these effects are best explained in terms of language as a form of top-down modulation (The Label Feedback Hypothesis)