Lab member Tally McCormick Miller will give a talk on "Music to my ears (and fingers): Investigating causal effects of verbal vs. musical labels on tactile discrimination" at the 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Düsseldorf starting today (07.08.).

Can language affect the nature of our perception? How much of our perception is shaped by our
own language? These questions were investigated using a controlled, within-subject experimental
design, where participants learned the discrimination of fine-grained, difficult-to-distinguish tactile
patterns on their fingertips with pseudowords or tone sequences. Their discrimination ability was tested
both before and after the associative learning, to test if there was any difference in their discrimination
abilities related to the co-presented linguistic or musical stimuli.