Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 23, 2025

A Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate Interference in Working Memory by Distractions and Interruptions
Published on: July 16, 2015
Making It Harder to "See" Meaning: The More You See Something, the More Its Conceptual Representation Is Susceptible
Charles P Davis1,2,3, Gitte H Joergensen1,2,3, Peter Boddy4,5
1Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut.
Abstract:
Does the perceptual system for looking at the world overlap with the conceptual system for thinking about it? We conducted two experiments (N = 403) to investigate this question. Experiment 1 showed that when people make simple semantic judgments on words, interference from a concurrent visual task scales in proportion to how much visual experience they have with the things the words refer to. Experiment 2 showed that when people make the same judgments on the very same words, interference from a concurrent manual task scales in proportion to how much manual (but critically, not visual) experience people have with those same things. These results suggest that the meanings of frequently visually experienced things are represented (in part) in the visual system used for actually seeing them, that this visually represented information is a functional part of conceptual knowledge, and that the extent of these visual representations is influenced by visual experience.
Related Concept Videos
Color Vision
Perceptual Constancy
Size constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same size, even when its image on the retina changes. For instance, a bus is perceived to be large enough to carry people, even if it looks tiny from...
Gestalt Principles of Perception
Visual Agnosia
Impact of Schemas
Parallel Processing

