Janyan Armina, Vankov Ivan, Tsaregorodtseva Oksana, Miklashevsky Alex
Research Center for Cognitive Science, New Bulgarian University, 21 Montevideo Blvd., Room 401, 1618, Sofia, Bulgaria,
Cogn Process. 2015 Sep;16 Suppl 1:259-63. doi: 10.1007/s10339-015-0718-5.
Previous studies show that eye movement trajectory curves away from a remembered visual location if a saccade needs to be made in the same direction as the location. Data suggest that part of the process of maintaining the location in working memory is the mental simulation of that location, so that the oculomotor system treats the remembered location as a real one. Other research suggests that word meaning may also behave like a 'real object' in space. The current study aimed to combine the two streams of research examining the effect of word meaning on the memory of a dot location. The results of two experiments showed that word meaning for 'up' (but not 'down') modulated both eye movement trajectory and location recognition time. Thus, mental simulation of task-irrelevant space-related word meaning affected both earlier stages of memory processes (maintenance of the location in the working memory) and later ones (location recognition).
先前的研究表明，如果需要朝与记忆中的视觉位置相同的方向进行扫视，眼球运动轨迹会偏离该记忆位置。数据表明，在工作记忆中维持该位置的部分过程是对该位置进行心理模拟，从而使动眼系统将记忆中的位置视为真实位置。其他研究表明，词义在空间中也可能表现得像一个“真实物体”。当前的研究旨在结合这两个研究方向，考察词义对一个点位置记忆的影响。两项实验的结果表明，“向上”（而非“向下”）的词义调节了眼球运动轨迹和位置识别时间。因此，与任务无关的空间相关词义的心理模拟影响了记忆过程的早期阶段（在工作记忆中维持位置）和后期阶段（位置识别）。
