Visual interference disrupts visual knowledge

Abstract

We show that visual interference impairs people's ability to make use of visual knowledge. These results provide strong evidence that making use of stored visual knowledge-long-term memory of what things look like-depends on perceptual mechanisms. In the first set of studies, we show that presenting visual noise patterns during or after hearing verbal cues greatly reduces the effectiveness of these cues on a simple visual discrimination task. In the second experiment, participants were tasked with answering questions about visual features of familiar objects, e.g., verifying that tables have flat surfaces. Accuracy in answering visual, but not encyclopedic questions was reduced when viewing colorful noise patterns. This result is most parsimoniously explained by positing that judgments required activation of visual representations that were being interfered with when viewing irrelevant patterns.

A task-dependent causal role for low-level visual processes in spoken word comprehension.

“…This view is supported by a recent study by Edmiston and Lupyan (2017) who found that visual interference impairs participants' ability to make use of visual but not encyclopedic knowledge during word processing. Our paradigm specifically assessed whether visual representations were necessary for the tasks at hand, not whether they were activated.…”

From words-as-mappings to words-as-cues: the role of language in semantic knowledge

“…Ostensibly the same information conveyed via visual cues had no comparable effect on visual discrimination. Combined, these results suggest that language activates visual representations that are partly constitutive of visual knowledge (Edmiston & Lupyan, 2017), but in so doing, augments them into a more categorical form than when ostensibly the same representations are activated by nonlinguistic inputs.…”

“…One consequence is that a person who learned, e.g., that alligators are green from books may be less likely to display interference of this knowledge by visual interference (Edmiston & Lupyan, 2017). To the extent that verbally learned knowledge also leads to convergence in the face of varying perceptual inputs, relying on language may also help people converge onto common semantic representations.…”

“…Semantic knowledge is a broad construct, including everything one knows about dogs, fruit, knives, things that are green, time machines, and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, etc. Researchers have attempted to understand the format in which semantic knowledge is represented (e.g., Barsalou, 2008;Edmiston & Lupyan, 2017;Laurence & Margolis, 1999;Mahon & Caramazza, 2008;G. L. Murphy, 2002) and how it develops (Carey, 2009;E.…”

How Reliable is Perception?

“…As argued elsewhere (Lupyan, 2016), this critique assumes that all knowledge is amodal. There is very good reason to think this is not the case (Barsalou, 2008;Edmiston & Lupyan, 2017;Pulvermüller, 2013), and that the representations that constitute our knowledge of what something looks like, have a perceptual format. And so the way to think about why hearing a word like "zebra" can help us see a zebra that is otherwise invisible (Lupyan & Ward, 2013) (without increasing false alarms) is that hearing a word activates visual representations (which partly comprise our knowledge of what zebra look like), acting as priors, affecting how we process a subsequently presented input.…”