Hearing "moon" and looking up: Word-related spatial associations facilitate saccades to congruent locations

In the experiment reported here, 30 participants made a lexical decision on 120 spoken words and 120 spoken nonwords. The words had either an upward (e.g. ‘moon’) or downward (e.g. ‘sewer’) spatial association, or they were neutral in this respect (e.g. ‘letter’). Participants made their lexical decisions by fixating a target located either above or below the centre of the screen, counterbalanced across participants. Saccade launch latencies to targets in a congruent spatial location (e.g., hearing ‘moon’ and looking up to confirm that the stimulus is a word) were significantly faster than those to targets in an incongruent location (e.g., hearing ‘moon’ and looking down to confirm that it is a word). Crucially, saccade launch latencies to incongruent target locations did not differ from those launched after hearing neutral words. Our results extend earlier findings (Dudschig et al., 2013) by showing that language-related spatial associations facilitate eye movements towards congruent locations rather than inhibiting eye movements towards incongruent locations.