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Related Concept Videos

Factors Affecting Perception01:25

Factors Affecting Perception

Perception is influenced by perceptual set, context, motivation, and emotion. Perceptual set, or perceptual expectancy, refers to the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, influenced by previous experiences and expectations. This phenomenon affects the interpretation of stimuli, creating a set of mental tendencies and assumptions that impact sensory perceptions of sound, taste, touch, and sight.
An illustrative example of a perceptual set is the scenario where an airline pilot told...
Perception01:28

Perception

Perception is a fundamental psychological process that enables individuals to organize, interpret, and consciously experience sensory information. This process is crucial for understanding and interacting with the world around us. It includes both bottom-up and top-down processing, each playing a distinct role in how we perceive our environment.
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Subliminal Perception01:15

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Subliminal perception refers to the processing of sensory information that occurs below the level of conscious awareness. Researchers study subliminal perception by presenting a stimulus, such as a word or image, very quickly, typically around 50 milliseconds. This rapid presentation is often followed by another stimulus, such as a pattern of dots or lines, which blocks further mental processing of the initial stimulus. As a result, if participants cannot identify the initial stimulus better...
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Framing Effects

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Gestalt principles provide a framework for understanding how humans perceive objects as unified wholes within their context. These principles are essential in explaining the cognitive processes that make sense of complex visual stimuli by organizing them into coherent groups. One fundamental principle is proximity, which posits that objects located close to each other are perceived as a collective group. For instance, when dots are positioned near one another, the visual system interprets them...
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 4, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
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Published on: November 30, 2018

Prior context and the perception of lexically ambiguous sentences.

V M Holmes1, R Arwas, M F Garrett

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, 3052, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.

Memory & Cognition
|February 19, 2011
PubMed
Summary

Lexically ambiguous sentences increase perceptual complexity, requiring computation of both meanings. This holds true even when context favors one interpretation, impacting word recall and sentence classification.

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Lexical ambiguity presents challenges in language comprehension.
  • Understanding how the brain processes multiple meanings is crucial for cognitive science.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To compare the perceptual complexity of lexically ambiguous versus unambiguous sentences.
  • To investigate the role of contextual bias in processing ambiguity.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments were conducted comparing word report accuracy and sentence meaning classification.
  • Stimuli included rapidly presented ambiguous and unambiguous sentences with and without biasing context.

Main Results:

  • Ambiguous words from ambiguous sentences were reported less accurately than unambiguous words.
  • Biasing context did not reduce the processing difficulty of ambiguous sentences.
  • Sentence meaning classification performance was also affected by ambiguity.

Conclusions:

  • Both meanings of a lexically ambiguous word are computed during sentence processing.
  • Contextual information does not prevent the initial computation of all possible meanings.
  • Lexical ambiguity increases cognitive load during language comprehension.