de Vega Manuel, Urrutia Mabel, Riffo Bernardo
Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, University of La Laguna, La Laguna, Canary Islands, Spain.
Mem Cognit. 2007 Sep;35(6):1410-21. doi: 10.3758/bf03193611.
Participants were given counterfactual sentences--for example, "If Mary had won the lottery she would have bought a Mercedes car"--or factual sentences--for example, "Because Mary won the lottery, she bought a Mercedes car"--embedded in short narratives. Reading times showed that readers were immediately sensitive to the special status of counterfactual information (Experiment 1). In addition, probe-recognition latencies demonstrated that old information was more accessible in counterfactual than in factual stories, and new information was equally accessible in both kinds of stories (Experiment 2). However, after reading additional clauses, new information became less accessible in counterfactual than in factual stories (Experiment 3). These results suggest that counterfactual events are momentarily represented but are later suppressed and the readers' attention goes back to previous events in the story.
研究参与者会看到嵌入在简短叙述中的反事实句子（例如，“如果玛丽中了彩票，她就会买一辆奔驰车”）或事实性句子（例如，“因为玛丽中了彩票，所以她买了一辆奔驰车”）。阅读时间表明，读者会立即对反事实信息的特殊地位产生敏感（实验1）。此外，探测识别潜伏期表明，在反事实故事中旧信息比在事实性故事中更容易获取，而新信息在两种故事中获取的难易程度相当（实验2）。然而，在阅读了额外的从句后，反事实故事中的新信息比事实性故事中的新信息更难获取（实验3）。这些结果表明，反事实事件会被暂时呈现，但随后会被抑制，读者的注意力会回到故事中之前的事件上。
