Trouble finding the red pen? Just say “tomato.” High-level conceptual information can direct our attention during visual search.

We take in a lot of information when we read words. Reading a word such as “tomato” that has a strong color bias draws our attention to that color and makes subsequent visual search easier, showing that attentional selection is affected by conceptual representations.

Source: Psychonomic Society News - March 2, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news