Date of Archiving
2018Archive
Radboud Data Repository
Data archive handle
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Publication type
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Access level
Restricted access

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Organization
PI Group Memory & Emotion
SW OZ DCC CO
Audience(s)
Life sciences
Languages used
English
Key words
object recognition; language; object shapeAbstract
Linguistic labels are known to facilitate object recognition, yet the mechanism of this facilitation is not well understood. Previous psychophysical studies have suggested that words guide visual perception by activating information about visual object shape. Here we aimed to test this hypothesis at the neural level, and to tease apart the visual and semantic contribution of words to visual object recognition. We created a set of object pictures from two semantic categories with varying shapes, and obtained subjective ratings of their shape and category similarity. We then conducted a word-picture matching experiment, while recording participants’ EEG, and tested if the shape or the category similarity between the word’s referent and target picture explained the spatiotemporal pattern of the picture-evoked responses. The results show that hearing a word activates representations of its referent’s shape, which interacts with the visual processing of a subsequent picture within 100 ms from its onset. Furthermore, non-visual categorical information, carried by the word, affects the visual processing at later stages. These findings advance our understanding of the interaction between language and visual perception and provide insights into how the meanings of words are represented in the brain.
Subsidient
NWO (Grant code:info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/NWO/Gravitation/024.001.006)
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Datasets [1399]
- Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [3568]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [28470]