Alumni Talk Series: Martin Maier (Berlin)
Abstract:
Can what we know and the language we speak influence how we perceive the world?
The idea that cognition influences perception is highly controversial:
on one hand,linguistic categorization and semantic knowledge could
have top-down effects on ongoing perceptual processing.
On the other hand, they might leave early perception encapsulated and only induce
pre-perceptual shifts of attention or influence post-perceptual processing like judgment
or response selection. I present three studies that exploited the high temporal resolution
of event-related potentials (ERPs) of the EEG to distinguish between these alternative views.
Some key results: the color categories of one's native language influence the chances of
consciously seeing or missing pictures in the attentional blink paradigm.
Learning that two novel objects are called differently makes them stand out more against
each other, leading to faster visual discrimination. And how much one knows about anobject
affects the same early visual processing stages during perception and mental imagery of that object.
In each of these studies, ERPs revealed top-down effects of linguistic categories and
semantic knowledge on early visual processing, beginning in the P1 component of the ERP.
Collectively, these results demonstrate that higher-level cognitive factors have the potential
to influence perception even at an early stage.
Martin Maier was one of the awardees of this year’s Glushko Dissertation Prizes at CogSci2019.
He also recently won the Adlerhof Dissertation Prize of HU Berlin for 2018.
After the talk, those interested can continue the conversation at Café Flora Soft where you can buy drinks at extremely reasonable prices!
Café Flora Soft - Haus 19
Philippstraße 13
10115 Berlin
All are welcome!
