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Whereof one cannot speak: How language and capture of visual attention interact
Florian Goller1, Soonja Choi2, Upyong Hong3
1Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Cognition
|August 25, 2019
Summary
Language shapes how we see the world. Korean speakers
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Linguistic relativity
- Visual cognition
Background:
- The relationship between language and cognition remains a key area of research.
- Crosslinguistic differences in conceptualization may influence nonlinguistic cognitive processes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether language influences attention capture in nonlinguistic visual search tasks.
- To determine if crosslinguistic differences in spatial relational concepts affect visual attention.
Main Methods:
- Participants performed visual search tasks involving stimuli with varying spatial fitness (tight vs. loose fit).
- Korean speakers, whose language grammatically distinguishes tight- and loose-fit containment, were compared to German speakers, whose language does not.
Main Results:
- Korean speakers demonstrated attention capture influenced by the spatial fitness of stimuli, unlike German speakers.
- This effect occurred even in non-instructed, non-linguistic tasks, suggesting language's implicit influence.
Conclusions:
- Language influences which visual features capture attention, even in tasks not requiring linguistic processing.
- Linguistic spatial relational concepts stored in memory can impact attention capture in visual search.
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