Unintended embodiment of concepts into percepts: Sensoryactivation boosts attention for same-modality concepts in theattentional blink paradigm

摘要

This study shows that sensory priming facilitates reports of same-modality concepts in anattentional blink paradigm. Participants had to detect and report two target words (TI andT2) presented for 53 ms each among a series of nonwords distractors at a frequency of upto 19 items per second. SOA between target words was set to 53 ms or 213 ms, withreduced attention expected for T2 under the longer SOA (attentional blink) and for T1under the shorter SOA (lag-1 sparing). These effects were found but reduced when the sen-sory modality of the concepts matched that of a sensory stimulation occurring prior to thedetection trial. Hence, sensory activation increased report for same-modality concepts.This finding reveals that grounded cognition effects (1) are involved in conceptual process-ing as soon as a word has reached the point of lexical identification and (2) occur indepen-dent of intentional access to sensory properties of concepts.