Shepherdson Peter, Miller Jeff
a Department of Psychology , University of Otago , Dunedin , New Zealand.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016;69(8):1564-82. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1088555. Epub 2015 Oct 27.
Recently, two groups of researchers have reported redundancy gains (enhanced performance with multiple, redundant targets) in tasks requiring semantic categorization. Here we report two experiments aimed at determining whether the gains found by one of these groups resulted from some form of semantic coactivation. We asked undergraduate psychology students to complete choice RT tasks requiring the semantic categorization of visually presented words, and compared performance with redundant targets from the same semantic category to performance with redundant targets from different semantic categories. If the redundancy gains resulted from the combination of information at a semantic level, they should have been greater in the former than the latter situation. However, our results showed no significant differences in redundancy gain (for latency and accuracy) between same-category and different-category conditions, despite gains appearing in both conditions. Thus, we suggest that redundancy gain in the semantic categorization task may result entirely from statistical facilitation or combination of information at non-semantic levels.
最近，两组研究人员报告了在需要语义分类的任务中存在冗余增益（多个冗余目标时性能增强）。在此，我们报告两项实验，旨在确定其中一组发现的增益是否源于某种形式的语义共激活。我们让本科心理学学生完成需要对视觉呈现的单词进行语义分类的选择反应时任务，并将同一语义类别中冗余目标的表现与不同语义类别中冗余目标的表现进行比较。如果冗余增益是由语义层面信息的组合导致的，那么在前一种情况下应该比后一种情况更大。然而，我们的结果表明，尽管在两种情况下都出现了增益，但同类别和不同类别条件下的冗余增益（反应时和准确性方面）没有显著差异。因此，我们认为语义分类任务中的冗余增益可能完全源于统计促进作用或非语义层面信息的组合。
