Abstract
In previous studies investigating logical-connectives simulations, participants focused their attention on verifying truth-condition satisfaction for connective expressions describing visual stimuli (e.g., Dumitru, 2014; Dumitru and Joergensen, 2016). Here, we sought to replicate and extend the findings that conjunction and disjunction simulations are structured as one and two Gestalts, respectively, by using language – picture matching tasks where participants focused their attention exclusively on stimuli visuospatial properties. Three studies evaluated perceptual compatibility effects between visual displays varying stimuli direction, size, and orientation, and basic sentences featuring the logical connectives AND, OR, BUT, IF, ALTHOUGH, BECAUSE, and THEREFORE (e.g., “There is blue AND there is red”). Response times highlight correlations between the Gestalt arity of connective simulations and visual attention patterns, such that words referring to constituents in the same Gestalt were matched faster to visual stimuli displayed sequentially rather than alternatively, having the same size rather than different sizes, and being oriented along axes other than horizontal. The results also highlight attentional patterns orthogonal to Gestalt arity: visual stimuli corresponding to simulation constituents were processed faster when they appeared onscreen from left to right than from right to left, when they were emphasized or de-emphasized together (i.e., faster processing of all-small or all-large stimuli pairs), and when they formed a downward-oriented diagonal, which signals a simulation boundary. More generally, our findings suggest that logical connectives rapidly evoke simulations that trigger top-down attention patterns over the grouping and properties of visual stimuli corresponding to the constituents they link together.
Highlights
Language commands an impressive battery of devices for encoding objects and events in the world
We investigated whether the connectives AND, OR, BUT, IF, BECAUSE, and instantly evoke Gestalt-like simulations that modulate attention patterns over the simulations evoked by the components they link together
The connective OR triggered faster responses for alternative compared to sequential displays, and the connective showed sensitivity to the direction in which stimuli were alternated, which we cautiously take as circumstantial evidence for an overall preference for alternative rather than for sequential visual displays
Summary
Language commands an impressive battery of devices for encoding objects and events in the world. Attention to Connective Expressions important items as anchors for smaller, less steady, or less important items when uttering “The bike is near the house” rather than “The house is near the bike” (Talmy, 2000). The former sentence suggests that ‘the bike’ is the item most likely to undergo change and most deserving of attention, it receives the most prominent role in the sentence (i.e., subject). We argue that language does more than encode information on objects and events in the world via morphology or syntax, and more than evoke simulations of objects in virtual scenes (Johnson-Laird, 1983) that match visual objects. We aim to show that logical connectives modulate attention patterns over simulations evoked by the constituents they link together
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