Processing Navon Letters Can Make Wines Taste Different

Abstract

Previous work has demonstrated that providing a verbal description of a wine impairs its recognition (Melcher and Schooler, 1996 Journal of Memory and Language 35 231–245). It was proposed that the effect was due to disruption of the perceptual memory by the verbalisation process as seen in face recognition. A similar impairment can be observed in face recognition after reading the small (local) letters of Navon stimuli. Here, it is suggested that the effect in wine recognition is due to a change in the processing style following the provision of a verbal description. In the current experiment we investigated whether the reading of Navon letters also affected the recognition of wines. We found that wine recognition was more accurate after the reading of the global letters rather than after the reading of the local letters of the Navon stimuli. The results demonstrate how the control of visual processing can affect perception in other modalities.