Verbal, not visual, cues enhance visual detection

August, 2010

We know language affects what we perceive, but a new study shows it can also improve our ability to perceive, even when an object should be invisible to us.

I’ve talked about the importance of labels for memory, so I was interested to see that a recent series of experiments has found that hearing the name of an object improved people’s ability to see it, even when the object was flashed onscreen in conditions and speeds (50 milliseconds) that would render it invisible. The effect was specific to language; a visual preview didn’t help.

Moreover, those who consider their mental imagery particularly vivid scored higher when given the auditory cue (although this association disappeared when the position of the object was uncertain). The researchers suggest that hearing the image labeled evokes an image of the object, strengthening its visual representation and thus making it visible. They also suggested that because words in different languages pick out different things in the environment, learning different languages might shape perception in subtle ways.

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