TY - JOUR
T1 - Language-guided visual processing affects reasoning
T2 - The role of referential and spatial anchoring
AU - Dumitru, Magda L.
AU - Joergensen, Gitte H.
AU - Cruickshank, Alice Gertrud
AU - Altmann, Gerry T M
PY - 2013/6/1
Y1 - 2013/6/1
N2 - Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical visual processing are yet to be determined. Here, we investigated the integration of visual and linguistic input during a reasoning task. Participants listened to sentences containing conjunctions or disjunctions (Nancy examined an ant and/. or a cloud) and looked at visual scenes containing two pictures that either matched or mismatched the nouns. Degree of match between nouns and pictures (referential anchoring) and between their expected and actual spatial positions (spatial anchoring) affected fixations as well as judgments. We conclude that language induces incremental processing of visual scenes, which in turn becomes susceptible to reasoning errors during the language-meaning verification process.
AB - Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical visual processing are yet to be determined. Here, we investigated the integration of visual and linguistic input during a reasoning task. Participants listened to sentences containing conjunctions or disjunctions (Nancy examined an ant and/. or a cloud) and looked at visual scenes containing two pictures that either matched or mismatched the nouns. Degree of match between nouns and pictures (referential anchoring) and between their expected and actual spatial positions (spatial anchoring) affected fixations as well as judgments. We conclude that language induces incremental processing of visual scenes, which in turn becomes susceptible to reasoning errors during the language-meaning verification process.
KW - Anchoring
KW - Attention
KW - Coordination
KW - Language-meaning verification process
KW - Reasoning
KW - Speech stream
KW - Visual stream
KW - Visual-world paradigm
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84876465780&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.008
DO - 10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.008
M3 - Article
C2 - 23603423
AN - SCOPUS:84876465780
SN - 1053-8100
VL - 22
SP - 562
EP - 571
JO - Consciousness and cognition
JF - Consciousness and cognition
IS - 2
ER -