Bermeitinger Christina, Wentura Dirk, Frings Christian
Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Campus A2 4, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany.
Brain Lang. 2008 Aug;106(2):153-63. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.03.003. Epub 2008 Apr 28.
There is abundant evidence from behavioral and neurophysiological experiments for the distinction of natural versus artifactual categories and a gender-specific difference: women's performances in cognitive tasks increase when natural categories are used, whereas men's performances increase with artifactual categories. Here, we used the semantic priming paradigm to study retrieval processes by presenting category labels as primes and exemplars as targets. Overall, in two experiments we found larger priming effects for natural than for artifactual categories. In addition, females showed positive priming effects for natural but negative effects for artifactual categories, whereas males showed positive priming effects for both categories. This pattern matches with that from other tasks and can be interpreted as evidence that the findings from these other tasks are, at least partially, indeed due to different representations or processing modes for males and females and not (exclusively) due to-for example-different familiarity with a category. In a further experiment, we showed that the found pattern for females can be manipulated by focusing on perceptual vs. functional features. The results can be interpreted as first evidence that there are (eventually in addition to different "crystallized" semantic structures) specific default processing modes that differ for males and females.
行为学和神经生理学实验提供了丰富的证据，证明自然类别与人工制品类别之间存在区别，且存在性别差异：使用自然类别时，女性在认知任务中的表现会提高，而使用人工制品类别时，男性的表现会提高。在此，我们使用语义启动范式，通过呈现类别标签作为启动刺激和范例作为目标刺激来研究检索过程。总体而言，在两项实验中，我们发现自然类别比人工制品类别的启动效应更大。此外，女性对自然类别表现出正启动效应，而对人工制品类别表现出负启动效应，而男性对这两类都表现出正启动效应。这种模式与其他任务的模式相符，可以解释为证据表明，这些其他任务的结果至少部分确实是由于男性和女性的不同表征或处理模式，而不是（仅仅）由于例如对某个类别的不同熟悉程度。在进一步的实验中，我们表明，通过关注感知特征与功能特征，可以操纵女性的发现模式。这些结果可以解释为第一个证据，即（最终除了不同的“固化”语义结构之外）存在男性和女性不同的特定默认处理模式。
