10 ms·

Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

237 points by wmlive 3y ago

wmlive 3y ago
»Language can have a powerful effect on how people experience events. Here, we examine how the languages people speak guide attention and influence what they remember from a visual scene. When hearing a word, listeners activate other similar-sounding words before settling on the correct target. We tested whether this linguistic coactivation during a visual search task changes memory for objects. Bilinguals and monolinguals remembered English competitor words that overlapped phonologically with a spoken English target better than control objects without name overlap. High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory for Spanish competitors that overlapped across languages. We conclude that linguistic diversity partly accounts for differences in higher cognitive functions such as memory, with multilinguals providing a fertile ground for studying the interaction between language and cognition.«
- hackernewds 3y ago
  They say often that French are bad at quick math and Chinese are better due to the nature of their numeric system
  - mahatofu 3y ago
    There’s definitely valid research on higher perfect pitch apprehension in Chinese speakers ( relative to linguistic tonalities ).
  - plaguuuuuu 3y ago
    Linguistic differences. About understanding fractions: In English it's "2 out of 5". In Chinese, Korean and possibly some other languages, it's "from 5, 2". Apparently just a quirk of language but results in a difference in ability to compute fractions, so there you go. Also in Chinese, reciting the times tables are shorter and (unproven) probably easier to memorise, "3 1 3, 3 2 6, 3 3 9". Although I'm not sure why that can't be done in English either.
    - ralferoo 3y ago
      > "3 1 3, 3 2 6, 3 3 9". Although I'm not sure why that can't be done in English It was a long time ago for me now, but I learned the times tables (using your example) as "three ones'r three, three twos'r six, three three's'r nine" etc. Seems like it's just the addition of a single "zrr" syllable after both numbers to me, and to me that seems easier to say than e.g. "3 2 6", maybe just because it's an automatic reflex to add the extra sound and not adding it makes it seem just a stream of numbers out of context.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    French is one of those languages where primary school will have tests on how to write/pronounce straight numbers. Like 71, 82, 93. And some will fail, because it's bonkers. Quickness is definitely not prioritized.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      On the other hand, if you practically have to do a little algebra in your head to figure out how to pronounce a number, I guess you’ll be good at algebra.
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    It might educational systems at play here. I've never been to China, and have no idea if this is wide-spread — I saw a documentary on children in China being taught mathematics at an early age using an abacus. Eventually, they remove the abacus but the child still mimes using it. And then gradually this disappears too. Essentially they're training their muscle-memory to do their maths for them. It was quite extraordinary to see, especially since I, while I flatter myself I'm reasonably intelligent in some areas, and worked in programming and related areas for many years, my ability to do any maths without a pencil and paper is abysmal. OTOH, it's not impossible I have un-diagnosed dyscalculia.
    - tgv 3y ago
      Or a ton of other factors. I don't think there's a convincing study that shows an effect of language on e.g. arithmetic. There is a whole bunch of studies where culture, environment, status, income, education, discrimination, age, etc. are confounds.
- tgv 3y ago
  Unsurprisingly, that's not what the headline suggests. And, as it turns out, they measured something else indeed. They measured recall of a visual scene after guiding subjects in different ways. English speakers were guided with e.g. clock and clown or clock and mirror. The first pair have some overlap, so (as theory suggests) subjects start looking at both. The second pair has no overlap, so the word clock doesn't make the subject scan for the mirror. Then they tested recall on these pictures. There are differences between people with different language proficiency, but they are small. So it doesn't show that speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently, but rather that people only recognize objects from partially heard words quickly in the language(s) they're proficient in. I wish they'd stop clickbaiting for this kind of technical studies.
canvascritic 3y ago
Man this reminds me of this trip I took to the Maldives as a kid. While spending time with locals, I learned the word "feyli," a term unique to their Dhivehi language. "Feyli" describes the feeling of sand between your toes as waves recede on a beach, a sensation familiar to many but so specific that English doesn't have a singular word for it. Before being introduced to feyli I simply enjoyed beach walks as a sum of various experiences - the warmth, the sound, the view. having a label for that specific feeling of sand sifting between my toes made it stand out in isolation. Each time I walked along the shore, my attention would hone in on that particular sensation, heightening my awareness and deepening the experience. It felt as though that one word added a new layer to my sensory palette Love how nuances in language can carve out niches in our perception, spotlighting elements of our environment that might otherwise blend into the background
- PunchTornado 3y ago
  as my old fried Witty used to say, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
  - wilg 3y ago
    Do languages have limits? I mean, the poster explained the situation in English. How much does terseness matter I wonder?
    - grey-area 3y ago
      Clearly they do have limits.
    - godelski 3y ago
      > Do languages have limits? Yes. Language is itself compression of thoughts. Thoughts themselves are compression of something larger (observations, experiences, combinations of other thoughts, etc). It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fouc 3y ago
Hey, looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis has finally been proven. Joking :-)
- Tainnor 3y ago
  The Sapir-Whorf hypotheses remains contested. IMHO everyone who isn't completely clueless has to agree that the strong version of SW is without merit (language doesn't seem to impose hard limits on our thinking), but those who have seen the evidence (e.g. in the field of spatial recognition) would also be hard pressed to deny that linguistic features do mirror cultural practices and points of view. Of course then the argument is whether the culture determines the language or the language determines the culture, but I find that a silly debate: clearly the two influence other in turn, shifts in culture will eventually be manifested in language but language is a very efficient medium to transmit habitual thinking patterns too.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Well most people think in words, so very clearly they should have influence on the way we think. Nearly all of us have thought aloud or produced thoughts while thinking. But some 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 people do not have inner speech. It would be hard to argue that speech dictates thoughts if one does not think in words (but this does not exclude influence). As far as I'm aware, the question isn't about if the weak SW exists, but how much influence language exerts on thoughts. I'd be surprised if it was close to zero but I would also be surprised if it was above 50% (whatever percent means here).
alganet 3y ago
That's not a surprise. I mean, it's pretty difficult to have a thought without using language. When we watch a scene, we kinda describe it automatically using words, and that description is bound to be affected by the language used. I wonder what was the everyday experience of a human before language. It must have been pretty different from the world we experience as literate monkeys.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > it's pretty difficult to have a thought without using language You get to be today’s 10,000! (xkcd reference) Not everyone has an internal monologue! 50% to 60% people experience their thoughts completely nonverbally. There isn’t a voice constantly narrating their lives. Some people don’t even process words as words but add pictures instead. Best part: the two groups don’t realize the other group even exists. We all think everyone thinks in the same way as us. Sauce: https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739 https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tekla 3y ago
    Being unable to debate with yourself in your head must really suck.
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      Being unable to comprehend complex spatial structures without trying to describe them in words must really suck.
  - retrac 3y ago
    This claim has always been very odd to me. My own thinking is, rather obviously, both. I have an inner monologue but it's not entirely word-based. There are mental visual images, and I often gesture with my hands reorganizing imaginary collections of objects while arguing with myself. There's also words going on too. There is also thinking through proprioception. The sense of awareness of the relative placement of the body in space. That, like the other ways of thinking, also overlaps quite a lot with both visual thinking (moving around imaginary objects) and lingual thinking (writing words in the air idly or sub-vocalization). It is probably not appreciated enough as a mode of thought. Anyway, I suspect it's something of a false dichotomy, and it's not a binary/multi-way clean split, but that most people think like I do -- in a mix of modes, to varying degrees, using all their senses, all their models of the world, simultaneously. But the assumption that I'm relatively normal is the usual conceit here, isn't it? :)
the_gipsy 3y ago
Reminds of Julian Jayne's essay, where he says that remembering is essentially re-narrating memories to yourself.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  I think it goes beyond simple rearranging. We actively change them. Maybe not many people are immune to this
  - taylorius 3y ago
    “But every person has their own encyclopedia written, which grows out from each soul, composed from birth onward, hundreds of thousands of pages pressing into each other and yet there’s air between them! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book of contradictions. What’s in there is revised by the moment; the images touch themselves up, the words flicker. A wave washes through the entire text, followed by the next wave, and the next . . .” - Tomas Transtromer.
peterfirefly 3y ago
I wonder if that will replicate...
nomind 3y ago
https://medium.com/@uchtchi_buchtchi/breaking-binary-barriers-720f1dcd7fa4 https://medium.com/@uchtchi_buchtchi/breaking-binary-barrier...
LordGrey 3y ago
I wonder how a group of aphantasics would affect the results. Everyones' mechanisms for remembering things is undoubtedly different, but aphantasia means you don't have mental imagery to consult. Does this mean that aphantasics rely more on linguistic cues and connections?
- passion__desire 3y ago
  I think using a language is like constructing a scene graph (computer graphics). Using language i.e. a scene graph representaiton to manipulate ideas and thoughts is far more efficient and faster. Just a guess. Different languages based on primitives might construct different scene graphs.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    > Using language i.e. a scene graph representaiton to manipulate ideas and thoughts is far more efficient and faster. This sounds like language thinker bias, or your definition of language is more abstract (like in Computer Science) than human languages. I can "construct a scene graph" just fine, and while I have to use words to describe the scenes to you, no words played a part in coming up with these examples or thinking about them: - imagine a rope running through several wooden blocks on a table and pick up various blocks, how do the rest of them behave? - imagine wooden discs of various sizes with holes, stack them on a pole, does it happen to be a valid solution for Tower of Hanoi? - imagine a toy car, start lifting one end, at what point does it tip over? I for sure am not using a human language for that. > Different languages based on primitives might construct different scene graphs. This is probably very much true in the same style as your native language biases your perception of color boundaries. For example: Finnish has just one word for "leg", not separate words for "leg" and "foot", so I view the abstract concept of the whole limb as one thing, not separated into two parts at the ankle. In using language, I may accidentally say in English "I hurt my leg" after kicking my foot into something; they're the same. For the reverse, Finnish has separate words for the front and back parts of the neck -- and I don't mean just throat, which is just the trachea area, I mean the whole frontal part of it. So, the thought of e.g. dirt on the back of my neck is separate from the though of dirt on the front of my neck. (No, I don't use the words in the thought.)
gumballindie 3y ago
This is like that "research" where speakers of different languages percieve time in different ways. I am not sure who funds this type of garbage but it shows that "science" is rifle with ridiculous findings. Suppose their "findings" are true - do I as a dual language speaker remember visual scenes in both ways? Laughable at best. Expressing visual scenes in different ways is obvious, since different languages have different constructs, but that shouldn't be comflated with experience.
- azernik 3y ago
  Generally research of this type finds that dual language speakers' remembered details depend on which language they've been primed with (ie made to use or listen to just before the activity). It's also much more subtle than the splashy headlines indicate - it's about which details you're more likely to remember, not some fundamentally different experience of the world.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Details are subjective, and that can be influenced by culture and language. For instance if in my culture it's more important to know the colour of your pants then i will remember that. If in your culture the colour of your hat is more important you will remember that. But a person's culture changes, and that person can still speak a particular language but memories be influenced by a different pattern. Correlation and casualisation etc.
    - azernik 3y ago
      The evidence from dual language speakers (primed language changing the task performance) suggests it is in fact about the language spoken - these are actual controlled experiments. Small effect sizes and not super interesting effects IMO unless you're doing deep neuroscience stuff on memory and attention, but it's pretty clear language plays a role.
      - yencabulator 3y ago
pstuart 3y ago
Radiolab has a great episode on how language literally defines our reality. https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words
zodzedzi 3y ago
> Bilinguals and monolinguals remembered English competitor words that overlapped phonologically with a spoken English target better than control objects without name overlap. High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory for Spanish competitors that overlapped across languages. We conclude that linguistic diversity partly accounts for differences in higher cognitive functions... This conclusion sounds like quite the leap. Even if the two observations they generated turned out to be 100% ironclad true, generalizing to "speakers of different languages" as a title and "linguistic diversity" from observing just two languages seems like a big jump.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Paper conclusions are always leaps. They are an embarrassment to science, and journals should ban them or move them to the editorial pages. Doing a bit of research shouldn't be a license to speed BS under cover of fact.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Science journalists should understand that one paper is just a piece of the puzzle.
INTPenis 3y ago
Knowing more languages helps your memory, wow, who woulda thunk it. :D I speak 4 languages that I got for free, without studying them. Just by being an immigrant, and connected to different european countries. This type of multilingualism is quite common in central europe. I remember meeting kids in Brussels who could speak 10 or 12 languages even, insane! And yes I can confirm that it sure feels like my memory is very good. I often describe it as a gift and a curse. Ignorance is bliss takes on a powerful meaning when you can't forget things.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fourier456 3y ago
I can’t wait for like 2-3 years from now when we can explore this with vision-GPTs trained with different languages.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
There is a subtle, but important, difference between memory and recall. One is data, the other is a function. I'm not sure how we could possibly measure memory directly. The only thing we can measure is some form of interaction with it, which means we are measuring the interaction itself. Our best understanding of memory (AFAIK) is that it is constructed just-in-time by the process of recall. So does the distinction matter? How much of memory is tied to comprehension? Having a word for something is one method of comprehension, but there are others. What happens when the word is provided later? We know that human behavior tends to be driven by narrative. I would be interested to see a similar study where unique expressions are isolated. Do people with a particular/specific way of talking about something do it differently?
- canvascritic 3y ago
  Nice. To liken it to computers, memory is a bit like storage, while recall is the act of retrieving what's stored. The concept of memory being JITed is intriguing. it's reminiscent of the dynamic nature of human cognition. I always like to think about how comprehension influences memory. Like. Can we truly remember something if we don't understand it? Or more precisely can the data be committed to memory losslessly. And to your point about the provision of words later, it brings to mind studies on the Sapir Worf hypothesis, ie how language might shape thought.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    It's pretty well known that memory is lossy. Otherwise witnesses would correctly remember specific details of a crime: in reality, people remember incorrect details quite often. I wonder if some language patterns are an emergent effect of the way memory is created and reconstructed. There seems to be some mysterious isomorphism here, but no one has really gotten a handle on the specifics of either phenomenon.
    - canvascritic 3y ago
      i'd lean towards the idea that while our memories can be imprecise, language patterns might not be just a byproduct of how memory is formed or pieced together. perhaps the environment, upbringing, and even personal experiences interweave with the linguistic structures, molding our recall in certain ways. it's multifaceted, and maybe it's less about one causing the other and more about them influencing each other. I'd even argue that while memory can be fallible, it doesn't necessarily mean that language patterns are solely an emergent effect of memory creation or reconstruction. there's potential that cultural, social, and experiential factors interplay with the linguistic aspect
Ekaros 3y ago
The title feels weird compared to article. Not that I don't believe there isn't large cultural differences between remembering visual scenes.
0xmatriksh 3y ago
certainly true, also the increase in vocabulary effects how we explain and remember things. When we recall things, we try to describe them in words and how we describe it helps in re-remembering things. If we do not have enough vocab to describe certain event we cannot interpret to someone no matter how clearly it is stamped in our memory. And this consequently effects us how we remember things while we revised it in our words.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Language dictates how you think. There’s this thing about colors. The more words you have for a different colors, the more colors you can see
robocat 3y ago
They are using a spoken word to prime the subject, so the title is highly misleading: In visual search experiments, participants typically hear a word and find the matching item among an array of object images. Crucially, the other objects in the array can be manipulated to resemble the target item visually or linguistically. For example, when asked to find a beaker among other objects, participants look more at objects whose names overlap (e.g., beetle) or rhyme (e.g., speaker) with the target word than at unrelated objects (e.g., carriage)
truth_seeker 3y ago
“The words we speak become the house we live in.” - Hafiz, the Persian poet
seanhunter 3y ago
This doesn't surprise me because I remember reading about how speakers of different languages process text differently. For example, given a passage of text and a simple task (Count the number of occurrences of the letter "e" in the text) people who's first language is French will frequently undercount, because they have become accustomed to the letter e being elided in many places in their native language. This was set as a task for a group of us during a diversity training at Goldman. It so happend I was in a group that included a couple of French quant phds. You can imagine their extreme bewilderment by miscounting in such a simple task, but this error seems to be a heuristic that is somehow wired into the perception of words when learning to read. Having accepted that speakers of different languages understand visual information in text differently, it seems not to be that big a leap to accept that visual memory would also work differently.

237 points by wmlive 3y ago

»Language can have a powerful effect on how people experience events. Here, we examine how the languages people speak guide attention and influence what they remember from a visual scene. When hearing a word, listeners activate other similar-sounding words before settling on the correct target. We tested whether this linguistic coactivation during a visual search task changes memory for objects. Bilinguals and monolinguals remembered English competitor words that overlapped phonologically with a spoken English target better than control objects without name overlap. High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory for Spanish competitors that overlapped across languages. We conclude that linguistic diversity partly accounts for differences in higher cognitive functions such as memory, with multilinguals providing a fertile ground for studying the interaction between language and cognition.«

hackernewds 3y ago
They say often that French are bad at quick math and Chinese are better due to the nature of their numeric system
- mahatofu 3y ago
  There’s definitely valid research on higher perfect pitch apprehension in Chinese speakers ( relative to linguistic tonalities ).
- plaguuuuuu 3y ago
  Linguistic differences. About understanding fractions: In English it's "2 out of 5". In Chinese, Korean and possibly some other languages, it's "from 5, 2". Apparently just a quirk of language but results in a difference in ability to compute fractions, so there you go. Also in Chinese, reciting the times tables are shorter and (unproven) probably easier to memorise, "3 1 3, 3 2 6, 3 3 9". Although I'm not sure why that can't be done in English either.
  - ralferoo 3y ago
    > "3 1 3, 3 2 6, 3 3 9". Although I'm not sure why that can't be done in English It was a long time ago for me now, but I learned the times tables (using your example) as "three ones'r three, three twos'r six, three three's'r nine" etc. Seems like it's just the addition of a single "zrr" syllable after both numbers to me, and to me that seems easier to say than e.g. "3 2 6", maybe just because it's an automatic reflex to add the extra sound and not adding it makes it seem just a stream of numbers out of context.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  French is one of those languages where primary school will have tests on how to write/pronounce straight numbers. Like 71, 82, 93. And some will fail, because it's bonkers. Quickness is definitely not prioritized.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    On the other hand, if you practically have to do a little algebra in your head to figure out how to pronounce a number, I guess you’ll be good at algebra.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  It might educational systems at play here. I've never been to China, and have no idea if this is wide-spread — I saw a documentary on children in China being taught mathematics at an early age using an abacus. Eventually, they remove the abacus but the child still mimes using it. And then gradually this disappears too. Essentially they're training their muscle-memory to do their maths for them. It was quite extraordinary to see, especially since I, while I flatter myself I'm reasonably intelligent in some areas, and worked in programming and related areas for many years, my ability to do any maths without a pencil and paper is abysmal. OTOH, it's not impossible I have un-diagnosed dyscalculia.
  - tgv 3y ago
    Or a ton of other factors. I don't think there's a convincing study that shows an effect of language on e.g. arithmetic. There is a whole bunch of studies where culture, environment, status, income, education, discrimination, age, etc. are confounds.
tgv 3y ago
Unsurprisingly, that's not what the headline suggests. And, as it turns out, they measured something else indeed. They measured recall of a visual scene after guiding subjects in different ways. English speakers were guided with e.g. clock and clown or clock and mirror. The first pair have some overlap, so (as theory suggests) subjects start looking at both. The second pair has no overlap, so the word clock doesn't make the subject scan for the mirror. Then they tested recall on these pictures. There are differences between people with different language proficiency, but they are small. So it doesn't show that speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently, but rather that people only recognize objects from partially heard words quickly in the language(s) they're proficient in. I wish they'd stop clickbaiting for this kind of technical studies.

canvascritic 3y ago

Man this reminds me of this trip I took to the Maldives as a kid. While spending time with locals, I learned the word "feyli," a term unique to their Dhivehi language. "Feyli" describes the feeling of sand between your toes as waves recede on a beach, a sensation familiar to many but so specific that English doesn't have a singular word for it. Before being introduced to feyli I simply enjoyed beach walks as a sum of various experiences - the warmth, the sound, the view. having a label for that specific feeling of sand sifting between my toes made it stand out in isolation. Each time I walked along the shore, my attention would hone in on that particular sensation, heightening my awareness and deepening the experience. It felt as though that one word added a new layer to my sensory palette Love how nuances in language can carve out niches in our perception, spotlighting elements of our environment that might otherwise blend into the background

PunchTornado 3y ago
as my old fried Witty used to say, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
- wilg 3y ago
  Do languages have limits? I mean, the poster explained the situation in English. How much does terseness matter I wonder?
  - grey-area 3y ago
    Clearly they do have limits.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > Do languages have limits? Yes. Language is itself compression of thoughts. Thoughts themselves are compression of something larger (observations, experiences, combinations of other thoughts, etc). It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fouc 3y ago

Hey, looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis has finally been proven. Joking :-)

Tainnor 3y ago
The Sapir-Whorf hypotheses remains contested. IMHO everyone who isn't completely clueless has to agree that the strong version of SW is without merit (language doesn't seem to impose hard limits on our thinking), but those who have seen the evidence (e.g. in the field of spatial recognition) would also be hard pressed to deny that linguistic features do mirror cultural practices and points of view. Of course then the argument is whether the culture determines the language or the language determines the culture, but I find that a silly debate: clearly the two influence other in turn, shifts in culture will eventually be manifested in language but language is a very efficient medium to transmit habitual thinking patterns too.
- godelski 3y ago
  Well most people think in words, so very clearly they should have influence on the way we think. Nearly all of us have thought aloud or produced thoughts while thinking. But some 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 people do not have inner speech. It would be hard to argue that speech dictates thoughts if one does not think in words (but this does not exclude influence). As far as I'm aware, the question isn't about if the weak SW exists, but how much influence language exerts on thoughts. I'd be surprised if it was close to zero but I would also be surprised if it was above 50% (whatever percent means here).

alganet 3y ago

That's not a surprise. I mean, it's pretty difficult to have a thought without using language. When we watch a scene, we kinda describe it automatically using words, and that description is bound to be affected by the language used. I wonder what was the everyday experience of a human before language. It must have been pretty different from the world we experience as literate monkeys.

Swizec 3y ago
> it's pretty difficult to have a thought without using language You get to be today’s 10,000! (xkcd reference) Not everyone has an internal monologue! 50% to 60% people experience their thoughts completely nonverbally. There isn’t a voice constantly narrating their lives. Some people don’t even process words as words but add pictures instead. Best part: the two groups don’t realize the other group even exists. We all think everyone thinks in the same way as us. Sauce: https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739 https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tekla 3y ago
  Being unable to debate with yourself in your head must really suck.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    Being unable to comprehend complex spatial structures without trying to describe them in words must really suck.
- retrac 3y ago
  This claim has always been very odd to me. My own thinking is, rather obviously, both. I have an inner monologue but it's not entirely word-based. There are mental visual images, and I often gesture with my hands reorganizing imaginary collections of objects while arguing with myself. There's also words going on too. There is also thinking through proprioception. The sense of awareness of the relative placement of the body in space. That, like the other ways of thinking, also overlaps quite a lot with both visual thinking (moving around imaginary objects) and lingual thinking (writing words in the air idly or sub-vocalization). It is probably not appreciated enough as a mode of thought. Anyway, I suspect it's something of a false dichotomy, and it's not a binary/multi-way clean split, but that most people think like I do -- in a mix of modes, to varying degrees, using all their senses, all their models of the world, simultaneously. But the assumption that I'm relatively normal is the usual conceit here, isn't it? :)

the_gipsy 3y ago

Reminds of Julian Jayne's essay, where he says that remembering is essentially re-narrating memories to yourself.

beebeepka 3y ago
I think it goes beyond simple rearranging. We actively change them. Maybe not many people are immune to this
- taylorius 3y ago
  “But every person has their own encyclopedia written, which grows out from each soul, composed from birth onward, hundreds of thousands of pages pressing into each other and yet there’s air between them! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book of contradictions. What’s in there is revised by the moment; the images touch themselves up, the words flicker. A wave washes through the entire text, followed by the next wave, and the next . . .” - Tomas Transtromer.

peterfirefly 3y ago

I wonder if that will replicate...

nomind 3y ago

https://medium.com/@uchtchi_buchtchi/breaking-binary-barriers-720f1dcd7fa4 https://medium.com/@uchtchi_buchtchi/breaking-binary-barrier...

LordGrey 3y ago

I wonder how a group of aphantasics would affect the results. Everyones' mechanisms for remembering things is undoubtedly different, but aphantasia means you don't have mental imagery to consult. Does this mean that aphantasics rely more on linguistic cues and connections?

passion__desire 3y ago
I think using a language is like constructing a scene graph (computer graphics). Using language i.e. a scene graph representaiton to manipulate ideas and thoughts is far more efficient and faster. Just a guess. Different languages based on primitives might construct different scene graphs.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  > Using language i.e. a scene graph representaiton to manipulate ideas and thoughts is far more efficient and faster. This sounds like language thinker bias, or your definition of language is more abstract (like in Computer Science) than human languages. I can "construct a scene graph" just fine, and while I have to use words to describe the scenes to you, no words played a part in coming up with these examples or thinking about them: - imagine a rope running through several wooden blocks on a table and pick up various blocks, how do the rest of them behave? - imagine wooden discs of various sizes with holes, stack them on a pole, does it happen to be a valid solution for Tower of Hanoi? - imagine a toy car, start lifting one end, at what point does it tip over? I for sure am not using a human language for that. > Different languages based on primitives might construct different scene graphs. This is probably very much true in the same style as your native language biases your perception of color boundaries. For example: Finnish has just one word for "leg", not separate words for "leg" and "foot", so I view the abstract concept of the whole limb as one thing, not separated into two parts at the ankle. In using language, I may accidentally say in English "I hurt my leg" after kicking my foot into something; they're the same. For the reverse, Finnish has separate words for the front and back parts of the neck -- and I don't mean just throat, which is just the trachea area, I mean the whole frontal part of it. So, the thought of e.g. dirt on the back of my neck is separate from the though of dirt on the front of my neck. (No, I don't use the words in the thought.)

gumballindie 3y ago

This is like that "research" where speakers of different languages percieve time in different ways. I am not sure who funds this type of garbage but it shows that "science" is rifle with ridiculous findings. Suppose their "findings" are true - do I as a dual language speaker remember visual scenes in both ways? Laughable at best. Expressing visual scenes in different ways is obvious, since different languages have different constructs, but that shouldn't be comflated with experience.

azernik 3y ago
Generally research of this type finds that dual language speakers' remembered details depend on which language they've been primed with (ie made to use or listen to just before the activity). It's also much more subtle than the splashy headlines indicate - it's about which details you're more likely to remember, not some fundamentally different experience of the world.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Details are subjective, and that can be influenced by culture and language. For instance if in my culture it's more important to know the colour of your pants then i will remember that. If in your culture the colour of your hat is more important you will remember that. But a person's culture changes, and that person can still speak a particular language but memories be influenced by a different pattern. Correlation and casualisation etc.
  - azernik 3y ago
    The evidence from dual language speakers (primed language changing the task performance) suggests it is in fact about the language spoken - these are actual controlled experiments. Small effect sizes and not super interesting effects IMO unless you're doing deep neuroscience stuff on memory and attention, but it's pretty clear language plays a role.
    - yencabulator 3y ago

pstuart 3y ago

Radiolab has a great episode on how language literally defines our reality. https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words

zodzedzi 3y ago

> Bilinguals and monolinguals remembered English competitor words that overlapped phonologically with a spoken English target better than control objects without name overlap. High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory for Spanish competitors that overlapped across languages. We conclude that linguistic diversity partly accounts for differences in higher cognitive functions... This conclusion sounds like quite the leap. Even if the two observations they generated turned out to be 100% ironclad true, generalizing to "speakers of different languages" as a title and "linguistic diversity" from observing just two languages seems like a big jump.

hgsgm 3y ago
Paper conclusions are always leaps. They are an embarrassment to science, and journals should ban them or move them to the editorial pages. Doing a bit of research shouldn't be a license to speed BS under cover of fact.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Science journalists should understand that one paper is just a piece of the puzzle.

INTPenis 3y ago

Knowing more languages helps your memory, wow, who woulda thunk it. :D I speak 4 languages that I got for free, without studying them. Just by being an immigrant, and connected to different european countries. This type of multilingualism is quite common in central europe. I remember meeting kids in Brussels who could speak 10 or 12 languages even, insane! And yes I can confirm that it sure feels like my memory is very good. I often describe it as a gift and a curse. Ignorance is bliss takes on a powerful meaning when you can't forget things.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fourier456 3y ago

I can’t wait for like 2-3 years from now when we can explore this with vision-GPTs trained with different languages.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

There is a subtle, but important, difference between memory and recall. One is data, the other is a function. I'm not sure how we could possibly measure memory directly. The only thing we can measure is some form of interaction with it, which means we are measuring the interaction itself. Our best understanding of memory (AFAIK) is that it is constructed just-in-time by the process of recall. So does the distinction matter? How much of memory is tied to comprehension? Having a word for something is one method of comprehension, but there are others. What happens when the word is provided later? We know that human behavior tends to be driven by narrative. I would be interested to see a similar study where unique expressions are isolated. Do people with a particular/specific way of talking about something do it differently?

canvascritic 3y ago
Nice. To liken it to computers, memory is a bit like storage, while recall is the act of retrieving what's stored. The concept of memory being JITed is intriguing. it's reminiscent of the dynamic nature of human cognition. I always like to think about how comprehension influences memory. Like. Can we truly remember something if we don't understand it? Or more precisely can the data be committed to memory losslessly. And to your point about the provision of words later, it brings to mind studies on the Sapir Worf hypothesis, ie how language might shape thought.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  It's pretty well known that memory is lossy. Otherwise witnesses would correctly remember specific details of a crime: in reality, people remember incorrect details quite often. I wonder if some language patterns are an emergent effect of the way memory is created and reconstructed. There seems to be some mysterious isomorphism here, but no one has really gotten a handle on the specifics of either phenomenon.
  - canvascritic 3y ago
    i'd lean towards the idea that while our memories can be imprecise, language patterns might not be just a byproduct of how memory is formed or pieced together. perhaps the environment, upbringing, and even personal experiences interweave with the linguistic structures, molding our recall in certain ways. it's multifaceted, and maybe it's less about one causing the other and more about them influencing each other. I'd even argue that while memory can be fallible, it doesn't necessarily mean that language patterns are solely an emergent effect of memory creation or reconstruction. there's potential that cultural, social, and experiential factors interplay with the linguistic aspect

Ekaros 3y ago

The title feels weird compared to article. Not that I don't believe there isn't large cultural differences between remembering visual scenes.

0xmatriksh 3y ago

certainly true, also the increase in vocabulary effects how we explain and remember things. When we recall things, we try to describe them in words and how we describe it helps in re-remembering things. If we do not have enough vocab to describe certain event we cannot interpret to someone no matter how clearly it is stamped in our memory. And this consequently effects us how we remember things while we revised it in our words.

jbverschoor 3y ago

Language dictates how you think. There’s this thing about colors. The more words you have for a different colors, the more colors you can see

robocat 3y ago

They are using a spoken word to prime the subject, so the title is highly misleading: In visual search experiments, participants typically hear a word and find the matching item among an array of object images. Crucially, the other objects in the array can be manipulated to resemble the target item visually or linguistically. For example, when asked to find a beaker among other objects, participants look more at objects whose names overlap (e.g., beetle) or rhyme (e.g., speaker) with the target word than at unrelated objects (e.g., carriage)

truth_seeker 3y ago

“The words we speak become the house we live in.” - Hafiz, the Persian poet

seanhunter 3y ago

This doesn't surprise me because I remember reading about how speakers of different languages process text differently. For example, given a passage of text and a simple task (Count the number of occurrences of the letter "e" in the text) people who's first language is French will frequently undercount, because they have become accustomed to the letter e being elided in many places in their native language. This was set as a task for a group of us during a diversity training at Goldman. It so happend I was in a group that included a couple of French quant phds. You can imagine their extreme bewilderment by miscounting in such a simple task, but this error seems to be a heuristic that is somehow wired into the perception of words when learning to read. Having accepted that speakers of different languages understand visual information in text differently, it seems not to be that big a leap to accept that visual memory would also work differently.