title: Categorical biases in perceiving spatial relations.
abstract: We investigate the effect of spatial categories on visual perception. In three experiments, participants made same/different judgments on pairs of simultaneously presented dot-cross configurations. For different trials, the position of the dot within each cross could differ with respect to either categorical spatial relations (the dots occupied different quadrants) or coordinate spatial relations (the dots occupied different positions within the same quadrant). The dot-cross configurations also varied in how readily the dot position could be lexicalized. In harder-to-name trials, crosses formed a "+" shape such that each quadrant was associated with two discrete lexicalized spatial categories (e.g., "above" and "left"). In easier-to-name trials, both crosses were rotated 45° to form an "×" shape such that quadrants were unambiguously associated with a single lexicalized spatial category (e.g., "above" or "left"). In Experiment 1, participants were more accurate when discriminating categorical information between easier-to-name categories and more accurate at discriminating coordinate spatial information within harder-to-name categories. Subsequent experiments attempted to down-regulate or up-regulate the involvement of language in task performance. Results from Experiment 2 (verbal interference) and Experiment 3 (verbal training) suggest that the observed spatial relation type-by-nameability interaction is resistant to online language manipulations previously shown to affect color and object-based perceptual processing. The results across all three experiments suggest that robust biases in the visual perception of spatial relations correlate with patterns of lexicalization, but do not appear to be modulated by language online.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America; Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kranjec
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
authors.forename: Gary
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lupyan
authors.affiliation: Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
authors.forename: Anjan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
mesh_terms: D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D065854:Spatial Navigation / Q000502:physiology*