Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research demonstrates that when participants read a sentence about an agent in a certain location and then are showna pictured object, verification time is shorter whenever the pictured object matches the final object state implied by thesentence. Using a sentence-picture verification paradigm, we set out to investigate if the same pattern of results holdstrue when proprioceptive and kinesthetic experiences are considered. In three experiments participants read sentencesthat implied object state-changes as a function of the impact caused by differently weighted items (You drop a bowlingball/balloon on a tomato) followed by a pictured object in either a canonical (e.g., a round tomato) or a non-canonical (e.g.,a squashed tomato) state. The results showed that depictions of non-canonical objects showed the effect, but depictionsof canonical objects did not. Thus, representations of object states compete when non-visual features of the situation areimplied by the sentential context.