News Finding: Vales said the use of language can change how people inspect the world around them.
Paper Finding: The pattern fits the hypothesis that labels influence the encoding and the maintenance of the target in working memory, an idea that has broad implications for understanding how heard words affect visual processing and performance in many cognitive tasks.
News Context: The study, she said , "is the first clear demonstration of the impact of words on the way children navigate the visual world and is a first step toward understanding the way language influences visual attention, raising new testable hypotheses about the process." Vales said the use of language can change how people inspect the world around them. advertisement
  
  "We also know that language will change the way people perform in a lot of different laboratory tasks," she said.
Paper Context: In conclusion, the present results document for the first time a role for object names in directing visual attention in young children in a visual search task. The results also document visual search processes in 3-yearolds that include a dissociation of the effects of labels and target-distractor discriminability, with the labels affecting the intercept of the search function but not its slope and discriminability affecting the slope but not the intercept. The pattern fits the hypothesis that labels influence the encoding and the maintenance of the target in working memory, an idea that has broad implications for understanding how heard words affect visual processing and performance in many cognitive tasks.