Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive penetrability describes cognition and perception as interconnected, with cognition impacting the process ofperception rather than just the interpretation. The current study addresses this claim in the domain of language, askingif language helps people detect nearly-invisible stimuli. Two experiments were adapted from Lupyan and Spivey (2010),where auditory cues were found to be more beneficial than visual cues in recognizing letters. Participants reported thepresence of a target letter that was either preceded by an auditory or visual cue (e.g., cues were either hearing emm or seeingM, followed by a visual M as a target). Detection sensitivity was calculated and compared within cue presentation type.Neither visual nor auditory cues helped participants recognize target letters more than the no-cue condition. These resultsdiffer from previous work demonstrating linguistic facilitation and indicated that neither linguistic nor visual informationaid in perceiving a matching item.