Does language influence the way we see the world? This question has fascinated scholars from the fields of cognitive psychology, linguistics and philosophy for ages. In order to make sense of our...Show moreDoes language influence the way we see the world? This question has fascinated scholars from the fields of cognitive psychology, linguistics and philosophy for ages. In order to make sense of our surroundings, we have to analyse objects that appear into our visual field. This happens during visual perception, a process underlied by a mechanism of separation and binding of object features, according to FIT (Treisman & Gelade, 1980). When creating meaning with language, a similar process takes place. During linguistic combinatorial processes, words are analysed and bound together into grammatical structures. In this study, the link between the two cognitive systems is assessed. We compare visual memory and combinatorial language abilities of children and adults by using a memory game with stimuli with and without overlapping features (colour and shape). To assess grammatical abilities, a grammar test was designed to assess combinatorial language abilities. It was hypothesised that they outperform adults in tasks concerning visual memory and that their visual memory correlated negatively with their grammatical skills. More specifically, we presumed that children would suffer less distraction from overlapping features because of their tendency to analyse the field holistically, without interference of grammatical ‘cognition’. We find that adults outperform children on the grammar test. Furthermore, we found that adults outperform children on the overall memory game. We also found that participants perform better during non-combinatorial trials than during combinatorial trials, in line with the hypothesis of holistic perception in children. However, we found no evidence of an effect of combinatorial language skills on visual memory.Show less
Objective: Emotion is known to affect our perception. Research has shown that fear, in particular, affects our perception by enhancing the processing of coarse low spatial frequency (LSF)...Show moreObjective: Emotion is known to affect our perception. Research has shown that fear, in particular, affects our perception by enhancing the processing of coarse low spatial frequency (LSF) information at the cost of detailed high spatial frequency (HSF) information. This biased LSF processing may be mediated by the subcortical or cortical pathway to the amygdala. However, findings on whether the subcortical pathway processes automatically are contradictory, and some studies found a mediation effect of anxiety. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate whether the processing of LSF information is automatic during threat and whether this is moderated by anxiety. Method: We used a high and low load visual working memory (VWM) task while participants performed a visual orientation discrimination task of LSF and HSF gratings, under safe and threat of shock conditions. Anxiety levels were measured with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Results: Using data from a previous similar experiment, we found a significant interaction effect of spatial frequency by VWM. We found significant main effects of spatial frequency and VWM; there was no main effect of threat condition. Conclusion: Our results indicate that LSF information was perceived more accurately than HSF information, that visual information was perceived more accurately under low than high VWM load and that this was not affected by risk of threat. Due to these results, we were unable to test for automatic processing of LSF stimuli under fear. To investigate this further, as well as to examine whether this is affected by anxiety, more research is needed.Show less
