Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2013 Aug;39(4):964-73. doi: 10.1037/a0030467. Epub 2012 Nov 12.
We examined whether the processing of words associated with distinct spatial locations automatically biases behavior toward these locations in space. In four experiments (Ns = 30, 34, 32, 32), participants were shown stimuli denoting objects typically associated with the upper and lower regions of visual space. In Experiment 1, words were categorized as man-made or natural by pressing one of two vertically arranged keys. Reaction times were faster for trials in which response locations were congruent with the stimulus-associated locations. Experiment 2 replicated the stimulus-response congruency effect when the stimuli were presented in a pictorial format. Stimuli-space interactions therefore seem to be driven by an automatic activation of the spatial attributes associated with the stimuli, irrespective of input format. In Experiments 3 and 4, a target detection task involving only one response button was employed to examine whether the effects observed in the first two experiments were due to attentional shifts, independent of response selection processes. In both experiments, the previously observed congruence effect between words and space either diminished or vanished completely. Consequently, the results of the four experiments in the current study point to a dominant role of response-selection processes in the genesis of space-object word interactions.
我们考察了与不同空间位置相关的单词的处理是否会自动使行为偏向于这些空间位置。在四项实验中（N=30、34、32、32），参与者观看了表示通常与视觉空间上下区域相关的物体的刺激。在实验 1 中，通过按下两个垂直排列的键之一将单词分类为人造或自然。当反应位置与刺激相关位置一致时，试验的反应时间更快。实验 2 当以图片格式呈现刺激时，复制了刺激-反应一致性效应。因此，刺激-空间相互作用似乎是由与刺激相关的空间属性的自动激活驱动的，而与输入格式无关。在实验 3 和 4 中，采用仅涉及一个响应按钮的目标检测任务来检查前两个实验中观察到的效果是否归因于注意力转移，而与响应选择过程无关。在这两个实验中，先前在单词和空间之间观察到的一致性效应要么减弱，要么完全消失。因此，当前研究的四项实验结果表明，响应选择过程在空间-物体单词相互作用的产生中起着主导作用。
