{"id":9802,"date":"2016-08-30T10:06:44","date_gmt":"2016-08-30T10:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=9802"},"modified":"2016-08-30T10:06:44","modified_gmt":"2016-08-30T10:06:44","slug":"a-visual-nudge-can-disrupt-recall-of-what-things-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/a-visual-nudge-can-disrupt-recall-of-what-things-look-like\/","title":{"rendered":"A visual nudge can disrupt recall of what things look like"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n

\"Gary<\/a>
Gary Lupyan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Interfering with your vision makes it harder to describe what you know about the appearance of even common objects, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison.<\/span><\/p>\n

This connection between visual knowledge and visual perception challenges widely held theories that visual information about the world \u2014 that alligators are green and have long tails, for example \u2014 is stored abstractly, as a list of facts, divorced from the visual experience of seeing an alligator.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe can perceive the world, and then know things about the world, and a lot of those things we learn through the senses,\u201d says\u00a0Gary Lupyan<\/span><\/a>, an associate professor of psychology at UW\u2013Madison. \u201cBut once we learn them, do they still continue to depend on the senses? That seems to be the case.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Pierce Edmiston<\/span><\/a>, a graduate student in Lupyan\u2019s lab, had volunteers answer questions that required them to quickly verify simple information about common objects.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Pierce<\/a>
Pierce Edmiston<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some of the knowledge he asked for was visual: Do alligators have tails? Are strawberries red? Do tables have a flat surface? And some was encyclopedic: Is a table furniture? Do alligators live in swamps? Are strawberries fruits?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

While study volunteers answered these questions, Edmiston would deliver a burst of \u201cvisual interference\u201d \u2014 colorful static noise \u2014 in an effort to disrupt the parts of the brain that process visual information:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cVisual interference selectively interrupted their ability to answer questions about the visual properties of objects. They had trouble trying to recall that kind of information,\u201d Edmiston says. \u201cBut it didn\u2019t change how good they were at accessing what they knew about the nonvisual properties of the same objects.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Previous studies exploring the recall of visual information typically employed brain scans showing visual circuitry in the brain activating when people were asked to recall what things look like.<\/span><\/p>\n

[pullquote]\u201cVisual interference selectively interrupted their ability to answer questions about the visual properties of objects. They had trouble trying to recall that kind of information,\u201d Edmiston says.[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

\u201cThat suggested a connection between recalling visual knowledge and visual processing in the brain. But it didn\u2019t show that the visual processing centers were necessary \u2014 just active,\u201d Edmiston says. \u201cWe\u2019ve shown more than a connection. Visual processing appears necessary for recalling visual information because disrupting perception, even subtly, disrupts people\u2019s ability to report what something looks like.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Edmiston\u2019s study was published recently in the\u00a0Journal of Memory and Language<\/span><\/a>, and was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The effect of the visual interference on study participants was not large \u2014 they were still able to answer the majority of the questions correctly \u2014 but the way the researchers were able to knock the brain off-kilter may feel familiar.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMany people, when they try to remember what someone or something looks like, stare off into space or onto a blank wall,\u201d says Lupyan. \u201cThese results provide a hint of why we might do this: By minimizing irrelevant visual information, we free our perceptual system to help us remember.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interfering with your vision makes it harder to describe what you know about the appearance of even common objects, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",1133,761,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c-300x201.jpg",300,201,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",750,504,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c-1024x687.jpg",750,503,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",1133,761,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",1133,761,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",1133,761,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",849,570,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",600,403,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",600,403,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",730,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",536,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",95,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",640,430,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/UWlogo_ctr_4c.jpg",150,101,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Psychology<\/a> Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}