Semantics in the Perception of Verticality 311

Seymour has shown recently that people take less time to judge that the word above correctly describes the spatial position of a small circle drawn ABOVE a large reference square than they do for the word below and the circle BELOW the square. Seymour has attributed this asymmetry to the tendency for people to invariably scan a picture from top to bottom. In the present study, the first experiment confirms Seymour's results, but the next three demonstrate that the asymmetry Seymour found cannot be accounted for by an attentional-scanning process. Instead, it is proposed that people interpret the words above and below as abstract symbols at a first stage of processing, interpret the pictures ABOVE and BELOW as abstract symbols at an independent second stage, and compare these two sets of symbols at an independent third stage. In support of this model, the results show, for example, that above is interpreted about 80 msec. faster than below at the first stage quite independently of what happens at the second and third stages. The asymmetry Seymour found is therefore attributable to the difference in the interpretation times of above and below at the first stage of processing.