Spatial Congruency Effects Exist, Just Not for Words: Looking Into Estes, Verges, and Barsalou (2008)

Estes, Verges, and Barsalou (2008) reported that reading a word with a spatial connotation (e.g., sky) interfered with the subsequent identification of an unrelated visual stimulus (letter X or O) presented in a semantically related portion of the screen (location-cue congruency, or LCC, effect). In a series of nine experiments, we attempted to obtain this effect but met with no success. Rather, we obtained other expected spatial and semantic effects highlighting the robustness of our procedures. We contend that the LCC effect needs to be taken with great caution. The LCC effect described by Estes et al. has important implications for theories of language processing because it suggests that, according to the embodied view of cognition, the activation of motor and action systems is an essential aspect of language processing (Šetić & Domijan, 2007; Yaxley & Zwaan, 2007; for recent debate, see Barsalou, 2016; Mahon & Hickok, 2016). Although several studies explored the influence of spatial information conveyed by language on subsequent perceptual tasks (for a review, see Louwerse, Hutchinson, Tillman, & Recchia, 2015), Estes et al.’s results (Experiment 3) are particularly relevant for several reasons. The observation of an interference effect is important because it cannot be explained by assuming that both the word and the target activate abstract spatial concepts at a higher semantic level, since if that were the case, facilitatory effects should be predicted (as observed in other studies; e.g., Chasteen, Burdzy, & Pratt, 2010; Meier & Robinson, 2004). Furthermore, interference was observed despite the words being presented in isolation, with no preceding context, no task to be performed on them, and short delays between the cue word and the target stimulus. Therefore, given that the effect was obtained without explicit or implicit reference to the spatial properties of the words, and given that there was no benefit to processing them, the interference effect suggests that spatial information is mandatorily and rapidly activated during language processing. Even though the LCC effect has been reported in other studies (Estes, Verges, & Adelman, 2015; Verges & Duffy, 2009) and by different laboratories (Gozli, Chasteen, & Pratt, 2013; see Table 1), our attempts to obtain the effect repeatedly failed. The initial experiments differed slightly from those reported by Estes et al. (2008). Subsequent experiments moved toward the original experiment, attempting to identify the boundary conditions of the effect. In order to demonstrate the sensitivity of experiments, we measured two spatial effects not related to the cue words but to the position of the targets and the response keys. The feature-integration effect concerns the relation between target features and response on consecutive trials (Hommel, Proctor, & Vu, 2004). Provided that targets have two basic features, (a) spatial location (up or down) and (b) target type (X or O), we expected quicker responses on consecutive stimuli sharing both features (i.e., the same targets appearing in the same location) or in the case of a complete mismatch (i.e., different targets in different locations) compared with 728127 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797617728127Spatial Congruency Effects Exist, Just Not for WordsPetrova et al. research-article2018