Colour Terms Affect Detection of Colour and Colour-Associated Objects Suppressed from Visual Awareness

Abstract

The idea that language can affect how we see the world continues to create controversy. A potentially important study in this field has shown that when an object is suppressed from visual awareness using continuous flash suppression (a form of binocular rivalry), detection of the object is differently affected by a preceding word prime depending on whether the prime matches or does not match the object. This may suggest that language can affect early stages of vision. We replicated this paradigm and further investigated whether colour terms likewise influence the detection of colours or colour-associated object images suppressed from visual awareness by continuous flash suppression. This method presents rapidly changing visual noise to one eye while the target stimulus is presented to the other. It has been shown to delay conscious perception of a target for up to several minutes. In Experiment 1 we presented greyscale photos of objects. They were either preceded by a congruent object label, an incongruent label, or white noise. Detection sensitivity (d’) and hit rates were significantly poorer for suppressed objects preceded by an incongruent label compared to a congruent label or noise. In Experiment 2, targets were coloured discs preceded by a colour term. Detection sensitivity was significantly worse for suppressed colour patches preceded by an incongruent colour term as compared to a congruent term or white noise. In Experiment 3 targets were suppressed greyscale object images preceded by an auditory presentation of a colour term. On congruent trials the colour term matched the object’s stereotypical colour and on incongruent trials the colour term mismatched. Detection sensitivity was significantly poorer on incongruent trials than congruent trials. Overall, these findings suggest that colour terms affect awareness of coloured stimuli and colour- associated objects, and provide new evidence for language-perception interaction in the brain.

Spoken words can make the invisible visible—Testing the involvement of low-level visual representations in spoken word processing.

“…timing). For instance, Lupyan and Ward (2013) had at least 1 s and Forder et al (2016) several seconds between word and picture presentation. These authors used such long delays to address a different research question, namely, the influence of expectations on perception, and thus used a set-up that encouraged the use of top-down expectations.…”

Unpredictive linguistic verbal cues accelerate congruent visual targets into awareness in a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm

“…Next to these two studies reporting no evidence for priming-like effects in a b-CFS paradigm, several other studies do report evidence for priming. Three of them (Forder et al, 2016;Lupyan & Ward, 2013;Ostarek & Huettig, 2017) were discussed in the Introduction, and we outlined the shortcomings (with respect to the main question of this study) of them. Interestingly, two other studies reporting evidence for priming use paradigms in which targets are expected due to the prime.…”

“…All in all, this summary of priming studies reveals that evidence for spoken linguistic labels affecting access to awareness of congruent targets was, up to this point, rather small and our findings not trivial. It is of relevance to compare our study with that of Forder et al (2016), Lupyan and Ward (2013) and Ostarek and Huettig (2017), since these studies used a similar paradigm and addressed a similar issue. First and foremost, our two experiments replicate the main conclusions of these studies: verbal linguistic labels affect access to awareness of visual targets which are congruent compared with incongruent with the linguistic labels.…”

“…Does linguistic information similarly speed up access to consciousness of matching visual information? This question was addressed by Lupyan and Ward (2013), and more recently by Forder et al (2016), and Ostarek and Huettig (2017). In Lupyan and Ward's study, participants were required to detect the presence of targets that were preceded by either congruent or incongruent linguistic verbal labels (e.g., a picture of a zebra preceded by the word 'zebra'), and were simultaneously masked by continuous flash suppression.…”

“…3 Importantly, even though CFS and b-CFS might, at first sight, appear as similar methods, it is important to note that presenting target and mask simultaneously (as in the former method) leads to results that can differ both quantitatively and qualitatively from results obtained by gradually introducing the target (as in the latter method; Kaunitz et al, 2014;Stein, 2019). In the one study in which b-CFS was applied to assess the time it takes for visual targets to enter visual awareness following linguistic verbal labels (i.e., that of Forder et al, 2016), the incidence of congruent trials was much higher than the incidence of incongruent trials (potentially introducing the added value of holding information in working memory, as discussed above). Thus, as it is still not known whether targets congruent rather than incongruent to linguistic verbal cues are prioritized for entering visual awareness without the potential confound of a role of working memory, we here apply b-CFS in two experiments in which the incidence of congruent trials was not higher than that of incongruent trials.…”