Conceptual representation of real-world surface material: Early integration with linguistic-labels indicated in the N400-component.

Abstract

Research in perception in the visual and auditory domains has traditionally focused on investigating highly controlled artificial stimulus material. However, a key feature of our perceptual system is the ease with which the input of a wide set of naturalistic co-occurring information is dealt with. This study investigated whether, during perception of real-world surface material, a conceptual representation is built that has the potential to interact with a linguistic description of the material directly. Short sentences were presented (e.g., This surface is smooth) followed by a matching or mismatching picture of a real-world surface material. The results showed early cross-modal integration effects during material surface perception in an N400-like potential, originating approximately 280ms after stimulus presentation. Overall, these findings suggest a rather early influence of linguistic information on material perception, suggesting that in line with object representation, real-world materials are represented in the brain in a format that allows interaction with non-visual information.