Abstract
Does language influence recognition for spatial scenes? In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed ambiguous pictures, with or without spatial sentences. In a yes—no recognition task, only the spatial sentences group made more false alarms toward the center of the spatial category than in the other direction; three other comparison groups showed no such tendency. This shift toward the core of the semantic category suggests that spatial language interacted with perceptual information during encoding. In Experiment 3, we varied the materials to test the interactive encoding account against a separate encoding account in which separately stored sentences are accessed during picture recognition. The results support the interactive encoding account in which spatial language influences the encoding and memory of spatial relations.
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This work was supported by NSF-LIS Award SBR-9720313 and NSFROLE Award 21002/REC-0087516 and was completed while the first author was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. We thank Kathleen Braun and Michelle Osmondson for help in conducting and analyzing the study, Jonathan Cohen and Benjamin Scott-Hopkins for help in preparing the manuscript, and Beth Levin, Jason Jameson, Jeff Loewenstein, and Phillip Wolff for helpful discussions of the ideas and methods. We also thank Satoru Suzuki for thed′ analysis program, Jeff Rouder for discussions of the statistical analyses, and Melissa Bowerman for allowing us access to her materials.
Note—This article was accepted by the previous editorial team, when Colin M. MacLeod was Editor.
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Feist, M.I., Gentner, D. Spatial language influences memory for spatial scenes. Memory & Cognition 35, 283–296 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193449
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193449