Boddy, P. & Yee, E.
BCBL
According to sensorimotor accounts, object representations are distributed over the same brain areas that are active when experiencing those objects. Because these accounts hold that conceptual representations are experience-based, they predict that representations of objects with which we have relatively-more visual experience should involve brain areas supporting vision more than those with which we have relatively-less. One possible consequence of this account is that accessing representations of "more-visually-experienced" objects could impair performance on an incompatible visual task more than "less-visually-experienced objects" because of competition for shared resources in brain areas supporting both visual task performance and "more-visually-experienced" objects' representations. We tested this prediction in a behavioral experiment where participants performed a Multiple Object Tracking task while they made concreteness judgments about aurally presented object names which varied (according to ratings) in the relative amount of visual experience participants had of them (e.g. "pencil"= less-visual, "penguin"= more-visual). Results show that participants had greater difficulty with the MOT task when making concreteness judgments on "more-visual" objects than on "less-visual" objects. This interference suggests that: (a) the conceptual representations of frequently seen objects share resources with parts of the visual system required to perform Motion Object Tracking, (b) visual information is accessed when performing concreteness judgments on "more-visual" words, and that (c) visual task performance can be interfered with by thinking about "more-visual" objects.