ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Language can boost otherwise unseen objects into visual awareness.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 79 papers.
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Who cites it
79 citing papers in PubMed.
- Consciously detecting and recognizing a past visual word after its sensory trace is gone.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Multimodal prior knowledge determines false memory formation.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Rethinking Urban Perception Through Linguistic Relativity a Review of Theoretical and Empirical Insights.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2026Review
- Mid-level perceptual features, and not ambiguity, accelerate access to awareness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- The Temporal Scaffolding of Sensory Organization.Annual review of psychology · 2026Review
- Semantic influences on object detection: Drift diffusion modeling provides insights regarding mechanism.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Spoken words affect visual object recognition via the modulation of alpha and beta oscillations.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- See what I mean? Reading visual verbs modulates ocular dynamics.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2025Article
- Unaware processing of words activates experience-derived information in conceptual-semantic brain networks.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Emotional concepts shape the perceptual representation of body expressions.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
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- How do students reason about statistical sampling with computer simulations? An integrative review from a grounded cognition perspective.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Review
- Words before pictures: the role of language in biasing visual attention.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
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- Priors and prejudice: hierarchical predictive processing in intergroup perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Using agreement probability to study differences in types of concepts and conceptualizers.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- The interactive effect of external rewards and self-determined choice on memory.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Conceptual Associations Generate Sensory Predictions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Auditory scene context facilitates visual recognition of objects in consistent visual scenes.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Tool use acquisition induces a multifunctional interference effect during object processing: evidence from the sensorimotor mu rhythm.Experimental brain research · 2023Article
19 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Linguistic labels (e.g., "chair") seem to activate visual properties of the objects to which they refer. Here we investigated whether language-based activation of visual representations can affect the ability to simply detect the presence of an object. We used continuous flash suppression to suppress visual awareness of familiar objects while they were continuously presented to one eye. Participants made simple detection decisions, indicating whether they saw any image. Hearing a verbal label before the simple detection task changed performance relative to an uninformative cue baseline. Valid labels improved performance relative to no-label baseline trials. Invalid labels decreased performance. Labels affected both sensitivity (d') and response times. In addition, we found that the effectiveness of labels varied predictably as a function of the match between the shape of the stimulus and the shape denoted by the label. Together, the findings suggest that facilitated detection of invisible objects due to language occurs at a perceptual rather than semantic locus. We hypothesize that when information associated with verbal labels matches stimulus-driven activity, language can provide a boost to perception, propelling an otherwise invisible image into awareness.
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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.