Gastvortrag von Dr. Martin Maier an der FU Berlin

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Redner: Dr. Martin Maier (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Titel: I see something you don’t say: How language and knowledge shape perception

Abstract:

Can what we know and the language we speak influence how we perceive the world? The idea that cognition influences perception is highly controversial: on one hand, linguistic categorization and semantic knowledge could have top-down effects on ongoing perceptual processing. On the other hand, they might leave early perception encapsulated and only induce pre-perceptual shifts of attention or influence post-perceptual processing like judgment or response selection. 
I present three studies that exploited the high temporal resolution of event-related potentials (ERPs) of the EEG to distinguish between these alternative views. 
Some key results: the color categories of one’s native language influence the chances of consciously seeing or missing pictures in the attentional blink paradigm. Learning that two novel objects are called differently makes them stand out more against each other, leading to faster visual discrimination. And how much one knows about an object affects the same early visual processing stages during perception and mental imagery of that object. 
In each of these studies, ERPs revealed top-down effects of linguistic categories and semantic knowledge on early visual processing, beginning in the P1 component of the ERP. Collectively, these results demonstrate that higher-level cognitive factors have the potential to influence perception even at an early stage.

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