Virtue Sandra, van den Broek Paul, Linderholm Tracy
Department of Psychology, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois 60614, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2006 Sep;34(6):1341-54. doi: 10.3758/bf03193276.
In this study, we investigated hemispheric differences in the generation of bridging and predictive inferences. Participants read texts that provided either strong or weak causal constraints for a particular bridging (Experiment 1) or predictive (Experiment 2) inference and performed a lexical decision task to inference-related targets presented to the left or the right hemisphere. Facilitation for strongly constrained bridging and predictive inferences was found in both hemispheres. In contrast, facilitation for weakly constrained inferences was stronger in the right than in the left hemisphere for both bridging and predictive inferences, although for the latter there was some facilitation in the left hemisphere as well. We also considered whether these effects differ as a function of the working memory capacity of the reader. High working memory capacity readers showed greater facilitation for strongly constrained inferences than for weakly constrained inferences in both hemispheres, whereas low working memory capacity readers showed this same pattern in the left hemisphere but showed equal facilitation for strongly and weakly constrained inferences in the right hemisphere. These results suggest that hemispheric processing, textual constraint, and working memory capacity interact to affect how readers generate causal inferences.
在本研究中，我们调查了在产生衔接推理和预测推理方面的半球差异。参与者阅读了对特定衔接推理（实验1）或预测推理（实验2）提供强因果约束或弱因果约束的文本，并对呈现给左半球或右半球的与推理相关的目标执行词汇判断任务。在两个半球中都发现了对强约束衔接推理和预测推理的促进作用。相比之下，对于弱约束推理，右半球的促进作用比左半球更强，无论是衔接推理还是预测推理，尽管对于后者左半球也有一些促进作用。我们还考虑了这些效应是否因读者的工作记忆容量而异。高工作记忆容量的读者在两个半球中对强约束推理的促进作用比对弱约束推理的更大，而低工作记忆容量的读者在左半球表现出相同的模式，但在右半球对强约束和弱约束推理表现出相同的促进作用。这些结果表明，半球加工、文本约束和工作记忆容量相互作用，影响读者如何产生因果推理。
