Schmitz Melanie, Wentura Dirk, Brinkmann Thorsten A
Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Campus A2 4, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany,
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2014 Mar;14(1):426-42. doi: 10.3758/s13415-013-0206-2.
In semantic flanker tasks, target categorization response times are affected by the semantic compatibility of the flanker and target. With positive and negative category exemplars, we investigated the influence of evaluative congruency (whether flanker and target share evaluative valence) on the flanker effect, using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. We hypothesized a moderation of the flanker effect by evaluative congruency on the basis of the assumption that evaluatively congruent concepts mutually facilitate each other's activation (see Schmitz & Wentura in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 38:984-1000, 2012). Applying an onset delay of 50 ms for the flanker, we aimed to decrease the facilitative effect of an evaluatively congruent flanker on target encoding and, at the same time, increase the facilitative effect of an evaluatively congruent target on flanker encoding. As a consequence of increased flanker activation in the case of evaluative congruency, we expected a semantically incompatible flanker to interfere with the target categorization to a larger extent (as compared with an evaluatively incongruent pairing). Confirming our hypotheses, the flanker effect significantly depended on evaluative congruency, in both mean response times and N2 mean amplitudes. Thus, the present study provided behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the mutual facilitation of evaluatively congruent concepts. Implications for the representation of evaluative connotations of semantic concepts are discussed.
在语义侧翼任务中，目标分类反应时间受侧翼刺激与目标的语义兼容性影响。我们使用行为和电生理测量方法，通过正性和负性类别示例，研究了评价一致性（侧翼刺激与目标是否共享评价效价）对侧翼效应的影响。基于评价一致的概念相互促进彼此激活的假设（见施密茨和温图拉发表于《实验心理学杂志：学习、记忆与认知》2012年第38卷第984 - 1000页的文章），我们假设评价一致性会调节侧翼效应。通过为侧翼刺激设置50毫秒的起始延迟，我们旨在降低评价一致的侧翼刺激对目标编码的促进作用，同时增强评价一致的目标对侧翼刺激编码的促进作用。由于评价一致时侧翼刺激激活增加，我们预期语义不兼容的侧翼刺激会比评价不一致的配对更大程度地干扰目标分类。在平均反应时间和N2平均波幅方面，侧翼效应显著依赖于评价一致性，这证实了我们的假设。因此，本研究为评价一致的概念相互促进提供了行为和电生理证据。文中还讨论了对语义概念评价内涵表征的意义。
