Department of Psychology, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2014 Mar 20;9(3):e92740. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0092740. eCollection 2014.
Nativists have postulated fundamental geometric knowledge that predates linguistic and symbolic thought. Central to these claims is the proposal for an isolated cognitive system dedicated to processing geometric information. Testing such hypotheses presents challenges due to difficulties in eliminating the combination of geometric and non-geometric information through language. We present evidence using a modified matching interference paradigm that an incongruent shape word interferes with identifying a two-dimensional geometric shape, but an incongruent two-dimensional geometric shape does not interfere with identifying a shape word. This asymmetry in interference effects between two-dimensional geometric shapes and their corresponding shape words suggests that shape words activate spatial representations of shapes but shapes do not activate linguistic representations of shape words. These results appear consistent with hypotheses concerning a cognitive system dedicated to processing geometric information isolated from linguistic processing and provide evidence consistent with hypotheses concerning knowledge of geometric properties of space that predates linguistic and symbolic thought.
本土主义者假设存在一种基本的几何知识，这种知识先于语言和符号思维而存在。这些观点的核心是提出了一个独立的认知系统，专门用于处理几何信息。由于通过语言难以消除几何信息和非几何信息的组合，因此测试这些假设存在挑战。我们使用改进的匹配干扰范式提供了证据，表明不一致的形状单词会干扰二维几何形状的识别，但不一致的二维几何形状不会干扰形状单词的识别。这种二维几何形状和相应的形状单词之间干扰效应的不对称性表明，形状单词激活了形状的空间表示，但形状不会激活形状单词的语言表示。这些结果似乎与关于专门处理与语言处理分离的几何信息的认知系统的假设一致，并提供了与关于空间几何性质的知识先于语言和符号思维的假设一致的证据。
