News Finding: "We also know that language will change the way people perform in a lot of different laboratory tasks," she said.
Paper Finding: For example, adults listening to spoken sentences look at a possible visual referent even when the visual array is irrelevant to the task (for a review see , and even look to shape-similar items when that item is clearly not the referent of the uttered word (e.g.
News Context: The way language is used can change how people perceive the world around them, Vales said. "We also know that language will change the way people perform in a lot of different laboratory tasks," she said. The findings "begin to tell us precisely how words help, the kinds of cognitive processes words tap into to change how children behave.
Paper Context: But clearly words can have effects on visual expectations -and where one looks in an array -without a visually presented target. For example, adults listening to spoken sentences look at a possible visual referent even when the visual array is irrelevant to the task (for a review see , and even look to shape-similar items when that item is clearly not the referent of the uttered word (e.g. By hypothesis, the underlying mechanism for these effects may be fundamentally the same as the one proposed here: Heard words yield representations (either expectations or biased encoding of seen things) in visual working memory and these active representations then drive where one looks in a scene.