Redundant spoken labels facilitate perception of multiple items.

Because of the strong associations between verbal labels and the visual objects that they denote, hearing a word may quickly guide the deployment of visual attention to the named objects. We report six experiments in which we investigated the effect of hearing redundant (noninformative) object labels on the visual processing of multiple objects from the named category. Even though the word cues did not provide additional information to the participants, hearing a label resulted in faster detection of attention probes appearing near the objects denoted by the label. For example, hearing the word chair resulted in more effective visual processing of all of the chairs in a scene relative to trials in which the participants attended to the chairs without actually hearing the label. This facilitation was mediated by stimulus typicality. Transformations of the stimuli that disrupted their association with the label while preserving the low-level visual features eliminated the facilitative effect of the labels. In the final experiment, we show that hearing a label improves the accuracy of locating multiple items matching the label, even when eye movements are restricted. We posit that verbal labels dynamically modulate visual processing via top-down feedback--an instance of linguistic labels greasing the wheels of perception.