School of Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Jul;22(7):887-90. doi: 10.1177/0956797611412391. Epub 2011 Jun 9.
People use spatial distance to talk and think about differences between concepts, and it has been argued that using space to think about different categories provides a scaffold for the categorization process. In the current study, we investigated the possibility that the distance between response keys can influence categorization times in binary classification tasks. In line with the hypothesis that distance between response keys can facilitate response selection in a key-press version of the Stroop task, our results showed that responses on incongruent Stroop trials were significantly facilitated when participants performed the Stroop task with response keys located far apart, compared with when they performed the task with response keys located close together. These results support the idea that the spatial structuring of response options facilitates categorizations that require cognitive effort, and that people can incorporate environmental structures such as spatial distance in their thought processes. Keeping your hands apart might actually help to keep things apart in your mind.
人们使用空间距离来谈论和思考概念之间的差异，有人认为，使用空间来思考不同的类别为分类过程提供了一个支架。在目前的研究中，我们调查了反应键之间的距离是否会影响二进制分类任务中的分类时间。与距离反应键可以促进按键版本斯特鲁普任务中反应选择的假设一致，我们的结果表明，当参与者使用位于远处的反应键执行斯特鲁普任务时，与当他们使用位于近处的反应键执行任务时相比，在不一致的斯特鲁普试验上的反应明显得到促进。这些结果支持这样一种观点，即反应选项的空间结构促进了需要认知努力的分类，并且人们可以将环境结构（如空间距离）纳入其思维过程中。将手分开实际上可能有助于在头脑中保持事物的分离。
