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    Nonverbal communicative signals modulate attention to object properties

    Marno, H. and Davelaar, Eddy J. and Csibra, Gergely (2014) Nonverbal communicative signals modulate attention to object properties. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 40 (2), pp. 752-762. ISSN 0096-1523.

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    Abstract

    We investigated whether the social context in which an object is experienced influences the encoding of its various properties. We hypothesized that when an object is observed in a communicative context, its intrinsic features (such as its shape) would be preferentially encoded at the expense of its extrinsic properties (such as its location). In 3 experiments, participants were presented with brief movies, in which an actor either performed a noncommunicative action toward 1 of 5 different meaningless objects, or communicatively pointed at 1 of them. A subsequent static image, in which either the location or the identity of an object changed, tested participants’ attention to these 2 kinds of information. Throughout the 3 experiments we found that communicative cues tended to facilitate identity change detection and to impede location change detection, whereas in the noncommunicative contexts we did not find such a bidirectional effect of cueing. The results also revealed that the effect of the communicative context was a result the presence of ostensive-communicative signals before the object-directed action, and not to the pointing gesture per se. We propose that such an attentional bias forms an inherent part of human communication, and function to facilitate social learning by communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD)
    Depositing User: Gergo Csibra
    Date Deposited: 03 Nov 2015 10:27
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:18
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12618

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