Works in Progress Symposium

The first reading I attended was by a young woman named, Samantha Patton.  Her presentation was titled, "Thinking in Color."  She started off her presentation with an example.  She said that a green apple could be recognized and pictured faster than a shiny apple.  The reason for this is because visual words are processed faster than any others.  Her objective is to prove that abstract words are grounded just as concrete words.  They had fifty-two people participate in the "data experiment."  The participants read a number of nouns some concrete and the majority abstact. The participants were not restricted by the responses they were allowed to give.  However, they were not allowed to choose rainbow or colorless as a color.  After they evaluated the results from the data experiment, they narrowed the free response to eleven colors.  Experiment 1, as they called it, used a stoop based format and excluded the color brown.  They used a program on the computer that measured accuracy and response time.  They seemed to be happy with the results, so I assume that what they had hypthesized was what they proved.