Vales Catarina, Smith Linda B
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, USA.
Dev Sci. 2015 Jan;18(1):65-79. doi: 10.1111/desc.12179. Epub 2014 Apr 11.
Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3-year-old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated search times and to examine one route through which labels could have their effect: By influencing the visual working memory representation of the target. The targets and distractors were pictures of instances of basic-level known categories and the labels were the common name for the target category. We predicted that the label would enhance the visual working memory representation of the target object, guiding attention to objects that better matched the target representation. Experiments 1 and 2 used conjunctive search tasks, and Experiment 3 varied shape discriminability between targets and distractors. Experiment 4 compared the effects of labels to repeated presentations of the visual target, which should also influence the working memory representation of the target. The overall pattern fits contemporary theories of how the contents of visual working memory interact with visual search and attention, and shows that even in very young children heard words affect the processing of visual information.
词语会引导儿童的视觉注意力吗？如果是，相关机制是什么？在四项实验中，对163名3岁儿童进行了视觉搜索任务测试，其中目标物仅通过视觉预览提示，或者通过视觉预览和一个口语化名称提示。这些实验旨在确定标签是否能缩短搜索时间，并探究标签产生影响的一种途径：通过影响目标物的视觉工作记忆表征。目标物和干扰物是基本水平的已知类别的实例图片，标签是目标类别通用名称。我们预测标签会增强目标物体的视觉工作记忆表征，将注意力引导至与目标表征更匹配的物体上。实验1和实验2使用了联合搜索任务，实验3改变了目标物和干扰物之间形状的可辨别性。实验4将标签的效果与视觉目标的重复呈现效果进行了比较，重复呈现也应会影响目标物的工作记忆表征。整体模式符合关于视觉工作记忆内容如何与视觉搜索及注意力相互作用的当代理论，表明即使是非常年幼的儿童，听到的词语也会影响视觉信息的处理。
