Research report 2011 - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Semantic but not perceptual memory determines how we interpret the world

Authors
Mitterer, Holger
Departments
Abteilung Sprachverstehen (Anne Cutler)

Summary
It has long been recognized that world knowledge influences how we view the world around us. It was not clear, however, whether this influence was exerted by the exact perceptual memory of how things looked or rather by abstract, factual knowledge about objects in the world. While these two sources of knowledge are usually highly correlated, traffic lights constitute an exception by being physically similar in European countries but named differently. Using this test bed, it was possible to show that language-specific labels guide how we see the things around us.

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