Trial reportPloS one2010
Making the invisible visible: verbal but not visual cues enhance visual detection.
Trial report in PloS one, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The role of language in the experience and perception of emotion: a neuroimaging meta-analysis.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2017Pooled it
- Effect of attention bias modification on depressive affect.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Assessing the role of magician patter on deception in the Three-Card Monte.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Words before pictures: the role of language in biasing visual attention.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Cognitive Science Progresses Toward Interactive Frameworks.Topics in cognitive science · 2023Article
- Article
- How biological attention mechanisms improve task performance in a large-scale visual system model.eLife · 2018Article
- Novel names extend for how long preschool children sample visual information.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2018Article
- Hallucinations as top-down effects on perception.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2016Article
- Gaining knowledge mediates changes in perception (without differences in attention): A case for perceptual learning.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2016Article
- Language as grist to the mill of cognition.Cognitive processing · 2015Review
- Does language do more than communicate emotion?Current directions in psychological science · 2015Article
- Words, shape, visual search and visual working memory in 3-year-old children.Developmental science · 2015Article
- The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
- Priming and the guidance by visual and categorical templates in visual search.Frontiers in psychology · 2014Article
- Article
- Language can boost otherwise unseen objects into visual awareness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Article
- Emotion words shape emotion percepts.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2012Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundCan hearing a word change what one sees? Although visual sensitivity is known to be enhanced by attending to the location of the target, perceptual enhancements of following cues to the identity of an object have been difficult to find. Here, we show that perceptual sensitivity is enhanced by verbal, but not visual cues. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL
findingsParticipants completed an object detection task in which they made an object-presence or -absence decision to briefly-presented letters. Hearing the letter name prior to the detection task increased perceptual sensitivity (d'). A visual cue in the form of a preview of the to-be-detected letter did not. Follow-up experiments found that the auditory cuing effect was specific to validly cued stimuli. The magnitude of the cuing effect positively correlated with an individual measure of vividness of mental imagery; introducing uncertainty into the position of the stimulus did not reduce the magnitude of the cuing effect, but eliminated the correlation with mental imagery. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Hearing a word made otherwise invisible objects visible. Interestingly, seeing a preview of the target stimulus did not similarly enhance detection of the target. These results are compatible with an account in which auditory verbal labels modulate lower-level visual processing. The findings show that a verbal cue in the form of hearing a word can influence even the most elementary visual processing and inform our understanding of how language affects perception.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.