Dudschig Carolin, Lachmair Martin, de la Vega Irmgard, De Filippis Monica, Kaup Barbara
Fachbereich Psychologie, University of Tübingen, Schleichstr. 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Cogn Process. 2012 Aug;13 Suppl 1:S151-4. doi: 10.1007/s10339-012-0480-x.
Interacting with the world around us involves dealing with constant information input. Thus, humans must selectively filter and focus attention on relevant aspects for the current situation. The current study investigates orientations of attention after words that do not convey spatial information in their meaning (e.g. cloud, shoe). The current study minimizes both the linguistic demands by simply presenting task-irrelevant words and the visual processing demands by implementing a simple target detection task. According to automatic response biases in the motor domain (Lachmair et al. 2011), we hypothesized that words such as cloud produce attention shifts in the direction of the typical location of the word's referent in the world (e.g. cloud up in the sky). Indeed, target detection was facilitated if target location matched the typical location of the word's referent. These findings are strong evidence for the important role of space during language processing, showing that vertical attention is modulated even by task-irrelevant verbal cues.
与我们周围的世界互动涉及处理持续不断的信息输入。因此，人类必须有选择地过滤并将注意力集中在当前情境的相关方面。当前的研究调查了那些在意义上不传达空间信息的词语（如云、鞋子）之后的注意力取向。当前的研究通过简单呈现与任务无关的词语将语言需求最小化，并通过实施简单的目标检测任务将视觉处理需求最小化。根据运动领域的自动反应偏差（拉赫迈尔等人，2011年），我们假设像云这样的词语会使注意力朝着该词语所指对象在现实世界中的典型位置的方向转移（例如天空中的云）。事实上，如果目标位置与词语所指对象的典型位置相匹配，目标检测就会得到促进。这些发现有力地证明了空间在语言处理过程中的重要作用，表明即使是与任务无关的语言线索也会调节垂直注意力。
