Irrazabal Natalia, Burin Debora
Universidad de Palermo(Argentina).
Universidad de Buenos Aires(Argentina).
Span J Psychol. 2016 Mar 14;19:E11. doi: 10.1017/sjp.2016.11.
During the comprehension of narrative texts, readers keep a mental representation of the location of protagonists and objects; a breach in spatial coherence is detected by longer online reading times (consistency effect). We addressed whether these spatial inferences involve verbal or spatial working memory in two experiments, combining the consistency paradigm with selective verbal and spatial working memory concurrent tasks. The first experiment found longer reading times with a concurrent spatial task under imagery instructions (t33 = 2.87, p = .021). The second experiment, under comprehension reading instructions, found effects of verbal interference on reading times and accuracy. With a verbal secondary task, reading times for the target sentence were shorter (t45 = 3.60, p = .004) and the error rate was significantly higher (t47 = 2.95, p = .005) than without interference. This pattern of results suggests that spatial inferences in narrative comprehension rely mainly on verbal resources, and spatial working memory resources are recruited when imagery is required.
在理解叙事文本时，读者会在脑海中形成主人公和物体位置的表征；空间连贯性的破坏可通过更长的在线阅读时间检测到（一致性效应）。我们通过两个实验探讨了这些空间推理是涉及言语工作记忆还是空间工作记忆，将一致性范式与选择性言语和空间工作记忆并发任务相结合。第一个实验发现，在图像指令下进行并发空间任务时阅读时间更长（t33 = 2.87，p = .021）。第二个实验在理解阅读指令下，发现言语干扰对阅读时间和准确性有影响。与无干扰时相比，在进行言语次要任务时，目标句子的阅读时间更短（t45 = 3.60，p = .004），错误率显著更高（t47 = 2.95，p = .005）。这种结果模式表明，叙事理解中的空间推理主要依赖言语资源，而在需要图像时会调用空间工作记忆资源。
