Language helps us understand what we see

Source: Image generated by A.I.December 10, 2024

Suppose you see someone making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. As you watch, you’ll probably be able to break down the actions they perform into steps, such as taking out two slices of bread or spreading jelly on one of the slices. When you observe this activity occurring, what allows you to break this event into its component parts?

Once you see the event, you can remember it later. this memory It may be useful to perform the same action later. So you might be able to (partially) learn how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich by watching others make it. What helps you remember what you saw?

One possibility is that the ability to explain events is a core component of the ability to remember events in parts. This possibility was explored in an interesting paper published in 2024. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition Written by Briony Banks and Louise Connell.

To test this possibility, they asked people to watch someone build a simple model using Duplo blocks. After watching someone build a model, participants had to build the model themselves. People are generally very good at this task.

So how can you tell if your language skills are helping you?

These studies capitalized on the observation that making people repeat words inhibits their ability to use language. So some people watched the video and said the word “the” out loud over and over, while others watched the video without saying anything. Similarly, half of the people in the study said the word “the” out loud while trying to build the model being built, while the others said nothing.

The researchers found that inhibiting one’s ability to use language by saying “the” while watching a video led to poorer performance later in rebuilding the model compared to people who watched the video without saying anything. discovered. Having to say “the” while building the model did not significantly impact performance.

Of course, it is possible that Any Performing secondary tasks while watching videos can reduce performance. In the second study, some people watched a video without doing anything. Some people were watching the video while saying “the”. The third group watched a video, listened to a click, and had to report each time they heard a click. This secondary listening task keeps people busy but does not interfere with language.

In this study, only those who watched the video while saying “that” performed worse when reconstructing the model. Both the group that did nothing and the group that heard the click successfully rebuilt their models.

What exactly does this mean?

These findings suggest that language influences our ability to understand and remember the events we see. These findings also suggest that language is less important once we have learned the event. That’s why people who said “the” when rebuilding the model had almost the same results as those who didn’t say anything.

You may not realize that you are describing an event in your head while watching it, but our ability to use language is part of the way we think, so when we are actually working on it We often do not realize that the language system is involved. In tasks such as understanding the events unfolding in the world. But it’s another way in which our language abilities support our thinking abilities.