Hearing "moon" and looking up: Word-related spatial associations facilitate saccades to congruent locations

Hearing “moon” and looking up: Word-related spatial associations facilitate saccades to congruent locations Ben M. Dunn (b.dunn.1@research.gla.ac.uk) Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow 58 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QB UK Yuki Kamide (y.kamide@dundee.ac.uk) School of Psychology, University of Dundee DD1 4HN UK Christoph Scheepers (christoph.scheepers@glasgow.ac.uk) Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow 58 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QB UK Abstract as sewers usually tend to be on the ground below our line of sight. Recent research has shown that the perceptual-spatial representation of words can have either facilitatory or inhibitory effects on processing. For instance, Richardson et al. (2003) showed that verbs with horizontal or vertical associations can inhibit participants’ ability to detect a visual target in a location compatible with the spatial axis implied by the verb. Specifically, upon hearing The ship sinks in the ocean, participants took longer to detect a small abstract target (a black circle or square) when it appeared on the top or bottom of the screen compared with the left or right. Similar results were shown by Estes, Verges and Barsalou (2008) who visually presented a context word (e.g. cowboy), then a noun associated with either an upper or lower location (e.g. hat or boot) on the centre of the screen, and after a 50ms delay, an X or O located at the top or bottom of the screen. Participants’ task was to identify the letter by pressing a key. The results showed shorter reaction times (RTs) when the letter was located in an incongruent compared with a congruent spatial location (e.g., seeing cowboy then hat and identifying a target at the bottom of the screen, compared with identifying a target at the top of the screen). Attempts to explain such inhibitory effects are often based on the amount of perceptual-featural overlap (in this case, the spatial location) between the direction word cue and the location of the target symbol or letter to be identified. In tasks such as those described above, the cue words direct attention to a congruent spatial location (i.e. cowboy hat would direct attention upwards), hence to identify a target in an ‘up’ location requires inhibition of the spatial traces activated by the cue, resulting in longer RTs. Conversely, in a similar scenario a target in a ‘down’ location requires no inhibition of the spatial traces activated by cowboy hat and therefore results in shorter RTs. In stark contrast, other studies reported facilitatory effects of perceptual-spatial representation on processing. For example, Stanfield and Zwaan (2001) presented participants In the experiment reported here, 30 participants made a lexical decision on 120 spoken words and 120 spoken non- words. The words had either an upward (e.g. ‘moon’) or downward (e.g. ‘sewer’) spatial association, or they were neutral in this respect (e.g. ‘letter’). Participants made their lexical decisions by fixating a target located either above or below the centre of the screen, counterbalanced across participants. Saccade launch latencies to targets in a congruent spatial location (e.g., hearing ‘moon’ and looking up to confirm that the stimulus is a word) were significantly faster than those to targets in an incongruent location (e.g., hearing ‘moon’ and looking down to confirm that it is a word). Crucially, saccade launch latencies to incongruent target locations did not differ from those launched after hearing neutral words. Our results extend earlier findings (Dudschig et al., 2013) by showing that language-related spatial associations facilitate eye movements towards congruent locations rather than inhibiting eye movements towards incongruent locations. Keywords: Language processing; Perceptual-spatial representation; Mental simulation; Embodied cognition. Introduction Dante Alighieri wrote, “Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground” (Sisson, 1993, p. 261). If we think of heaven as above us, should we not look up towards it? Certain concepts activate perceptual-spatial locations; more specifically, words such as ‘push’ or ‘pull’ seem to be mentally represented on a horizontal axis whereas ‘float’ and ‘sink’ are more likely to activate vertical mental representations (Richardson, Spivey, Barsalou, & McRae, 2003). To use an example, the concept associated with the word moon is likely to entail an upward spatial representation due to our experience that when talking about the moon, we are often looking up towards it, or about to look up towards it, respectively. Similarly, the word sewer is more likely to invoke a downward mental representation