OFAI 2022 Lecture Series - OFAI

According to the perceptual symbol hypothesis (Barsalou, 1999), word concepts trigger mental re-enactments of perceptual states and actions. While many studies have shown how word concepts modulate sensori-motor responses, it is less well known how sensori-motor actions influence access to word concepts in memory. Here, we investigated how well English words with strong horizontal or vertical associations are retrieved from memory dependent on how they are presented during encoding (i.e., horizontally or vertically printed). Initial pre-testing of 129 candidate words yielded 43 words with a strong horizontal association (e.g., floor, beach, border, etc.) and 51 words with a strong vertical association (e.g., tree, crane, bottle, etc.). These were quasi-randomly compiled into 160 'crossword arrays', each containing 5 horizontally and 5 vertically printed items drawn from the horizontal association word set, as well as 5 horizontally and 5 vertically printed items drawn from the vertical association word set.