Department of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom ; Division of Psychology, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
PLoS One. 2013 Dec 20;8(12):e83282. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0083282. eCollection 2013.
Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A possible explanation for these inconsistencies may be inadvertent biases in the stimuli selected for test - with category-specific effects driven by characteristics of test stimuli other than animacy per se. In this study, we pit animacy against feature structure (intra-item variability), in a picture-word matching task. For unimpaired adults, regardless of whether objects were from animate (mammals; insects) or inanimate (clothes; musical instruments) superordinate categories, participants were faster to match basic level labels with objects from categories with low intra-item variability (mammals; clothes) than from categories with high intra-item variability (insects; instruments). Thus, pitting animacy against variability allowed us to clarify that observable differences in processing speed between animals and instruments are systematically driven by the intra-item variability of the superordinate categories, and not by animacy itself.
理论解释和行为研究报告了生动性效应，提供了不一致且有时相互矛盾的结果。这些不一致的一个可能解释可能是测试中选择的刺激物无意中存在偏差——类别特异性效应是由测试刺激物的特征驱动的，而不是生动性本身。在这项研究中，我们在图片-单词匹配任务中对比了生动性和特征结构（项目内变异性）。对于未受损的成年人来说，无论物体来自有生命的（哺乳动物；昆虫）还是无生命的（衣服；乐器）上义词类别，参与者用基本水平标签匹配具有低项目内变异性（哺乳动物；衣服）的类别中的物体的速度比匹配具有高项目内变异性（昆虫；仪器）的类别的物体的速度快。因此，将生动性与变异性进行对比，使我们能够澄清这样一个事实，即动物和仪器之间处理速度的可观察差异是由上义词类别的项目内变异性而不是生动性本身驱动的。
