Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is debated how far-reaching effects of language on cognition are - if they exist at all. Using a visual search paradigm,we tested whether native Korean and German speakers are differentially sensitive to visual 3D-object composites thatonly the Korean, but not the German (nor the English), language semantically distinguishes as tight- versus loose-fit. Weinstructed our participants to search for a colour-defined target composite among distractors. However, targets were alsoimplicitly signalled by their tight- or loose-fit composites. Only Korean speakers picked up on this implicit target-definingcharacteristic, reflected in attention capture by target-similar composites. As these concepts are not grammticalised inthe German language, our results demonstrate that language can determine which visual features capture attention. Ourresearch introduces a novel approach because processing of the linguistically discriminated visual characteristics wasneither instructed nor necessary for the task, demonstrating a case of linguistic relativity of cognition.