THE TIME COURSE OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FROM VISUALLY PRESENTED PICTURES AND WORDS (SEMANTIC MEMORY)

A category decision task using pictures and words and stimulus-onset-asynchronies (SOA) varying from 125 ms to 750 ms was used to trace the time course of information retrieval from semantic memory. Experiments 1 and 2 found that the processing of pictures and words appears to access a common semantic representation starting around 350 ms after stimulus onset. Experiments 3, 4 and 5 tested the hypothesis that intrinsic physical attribute information is the source of the often noted picture advantage in category decisions. It was found that object similarity information affected the processing of words in the same way as it affected the processing of pictures. Further this effect was obtained for cross modality presentations at the shortest SOA examined, 150 ms. It was concluded that pictures and words access a common source of physical attribute information that is a central component of the semantic representation of pictures and words.