5.10.1. In Action (2)
So, here’s a test to see if people can use both kinds of information in combination.5 Show a person something he’d like, like some food, and let him see you hide it behind the curtains in one corner of the room. Now disorient him by spinning him around and ask him to find the food. If he can combine the geometric and the color information, he’ll have no problem finding the foodhe’ll be able to tell unambiguously which corner it was hidden in. If he doesn’t combine information across modules, he will get it right 50% of the time and 50% of the time wrong on his first guess and need a second guess to find the food.
Where does language come into it? Well, language seems to define the kinds of subjects who can do this task at better than 50% accuracy. Rats can’t do it. Children who don’t have language yet can’t do it. Postlinguistic children and adults can do it.
Convinced? Here’s the rub: if you tie up an adult’s language ability, her performance drops to close to 50%. This is what Linda Hermer-Vazquez, Elizabeth Spelke, and Alla Katsnelson did.6 They got subjects to do the experiment, but all the time they were doing it, they were asked to repeat the text of newspaper articles that were played to them over loudspeakers. This “verbal shadowing task” completely engaged their language ability, removing their inner monologue.
The same subjects could orient themselves and find the correct corner fine when they weren’t doing the task. They could do it when they were doing an equivalently difficult task that didn’t tie up their language ability (copying a sequence of rhythms by clapping). But they couldn’t do it with their language resources engaged in something else. There’s something special about language that is essential for reorienting yourself using both kinds of information available in the room.
Taken from : Mind Hacks
