Abstract
Interacting with the world around us involves dealing with constant information input. Thus, humans must selectively filter and focus attention on relevant aspects for the current situation. The current study investigates orientations of attention after words that do not convey spatial information in their meaning (e.g. cloud, shoe). The current study minimizes both the linguistic demands by simply presenting task-irrelevant words and the visual processing demands by implementing a simple target detection task. According to automatic response biases in the motor domain (Lachmair et al. 2011), we hypothesized that words such as cloud produce attention shifts in the direction of the typical location of the word’s referent in the world (e.g. cloud up in the sky). Indeed, target detection was facilitated if target location matched the typical location of the word’s referent. These findings are strong evidence for the important role of space during language processing, showing that vertical attention is modulated even by task-irrelevant verbal cues.
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Acknowledgments
This project was supported by a Margarete-von-Wrangell Fellowship awarded to Carolin Dudschig (European Social Fund and the Ministry Of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg) and by the SFB833/B4 project of Barbara Kaup (German Research Foundation).
Conflict of interest
This supplement was not sponsored by outside commercial interests. It was funded entirely by ECONA, Via dei Marsi, 78, 00185 Roma, Italy.
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Dudschig, C., Lachmair, M., de la Vega, I. et al. From top to bottom: spatial shifts of attention caused by linguistic stimuli. Cogn Process 13 (Suppl 1), 151–154 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0480-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0480-x