As I said a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation at work. And before some people start saying, “What, still?,” I would like to point out that 1) I am actually expected to do other things at work ocassionally, and 2) there’s so much information in this book I kept having to stop and think all the time, which slows down the reading process a bit. Darn that interesting nonfiction. So anyway, I finished the book today and now have several posts worth of stuff to talk about.
For today, I’ve picked out some of the information she had to present about the way human verbal vs. visual cognition works. Grandin is known for her assertion that she thinks in pictures, hence the name of her autobiography, Thinking In Pictures, so she’s done a lot of thinking about this topic, clearly. She describes the following study to demonstrate how the two types of thinking seem almost opposed.
Research shows that language suppresses visual memory. This is called verbal overshadowing and is a well-established phenomenon… For example, in one study people watched a short videotape of a bank robbery, then spent twenty minutes doing something unrelated. Then one group spent five minutes writing down everything they could remember about the bank robber’s face, while the other group did an unrelated task.
Two thirds of the people who wrote nothing down and did unrelated tasks could identify a photograph of the robber, while only one third of the people who wrote verbal descriptions could pick him out…
I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don’t have to see all those details consciously…
-Grandin, 261
Posted by Dana
