Verifying properties of concepts spontaneously requires sharing resources with same-modality percept.

ABSTRACT

In the present experiments, participants had to verify properties of concepts but, depending on the trial condition, concept-property pairs were presented via headphones or on the screen. The results showed that participants took longer and were less accurate at verifying conceptual properties when the channel used to present the CONCEPT-property pair and the type of property matched in sensory modality (e.g., LEMON-yellow on screen; BLENDER-loud in headphones) compared to when properties and channel did not match (e.g., LEMON-yellow in headphones; BLENDER-loud on screen). Such interference is consistent with theories of embodied cognition holding that knowledge is grounded in modality-specific systems (Barsalou in Behav Brain Sci 22577-660, 1999). When the resources of one modality are burdened during the task, processing costs are incurred in a conceptual task (Vermeulen et al. in Cognition 109287-294, 2008).