News Finding: "What we've shown is that in 3-year-old children, words activate memories that then rapidly deploy attention and lead children to find the relevant object in a cluttered array," said Smith, Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Paper Finding: 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.
News Context: "If the name of the target object was also said, the children were much faster at finding it and less distracted by the other objects in the scene," said Vales, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "What we've shown is that in 3-year-old children, words activate memories that then rapidly deploy attention and lead children to find the relevant object in a cluttered array," said Smith, Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "Words call up an idea that is more robust than an image and to which we more rapidly respond.
Paper Context: 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. The two hypothesized approaches to search illustrated in Figure 6 differ principally in whether the target representation is active throughout search or whether it is activated upon seeing a similar enough item in the array.