Visual interference disrupts visual knowledge

•Is visual long-term memory completely distinct from visual perception?•Disrupting visual perception selectively impaired visual knowledge.•Visual interference impaired the verbal cueing of visual recognition.•Visual interference impaired the ability to verify visual properties of objects.•Visual knowledge depends in part on mechanisms shared with vision.

We show that visual interference impairs people’s ability to make use of visual knowledge. These results provide strong evidence that making use of stored visual knowledge—long-term memory of what things look like—depends on perceptual mechanisms. In the first set of studies, we show that presenting visual noise patterns during or after hearing a verbal cue greatly reduces the effectiveness of the cue on a simple visual discrimination task. In the second experiment, participants were tasked with answering questions about visual features of familiar objects, e.g., verifying that tables have flat surfaces. Accuracy in answering visual, but not encyclopedic questions was reduced when viewing colorful noise patterns. This result is most parsimoniously explained by positing that judgments required activation of visual representations that were being interfered with when viewing irrelevant patterns. Although much of our conceptual knowledge may abstract away from perceptual details, knowledge of what things look like appears to be represented in a visual format.

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