Cooperrider Kensy, Gentner Dedre, Goldin-Meadow Susan
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 USA.
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2016;1(1):28. doi: 10.1186/s41235-016-0024-5. Epub 2016 Dec 7.
How do people think about complex phenomena like the behavior of ecosystems? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such relational systems in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this possibility by examining spontaneous gestures. In two studies, participants read a written lesson describing positive and negative feedback systems and then explained the differences between them. Though the lesson was highly abstract and people were not instructed to gesture, people produced spatial gestures in abundance during their explanations. These gestures used space to represent simple abstract relations (e.g., ) and sometimes more complex relational structures (e.g., ). Moreover, over the course of their explanations, participants' gestures often cohered into larger analogical models of relational structure. Importantly, the spatial ideas evident in the hands were largely unaccompanied by spatial words. Gesture thus suggests that spatial analogies are pervasive in complex relational reasoning, even when language does not.
人们如何思考诸如生态系统行为这样的复杂现象呢？在此我们假设，人们在一定程度上通过创建空间类比来对这类关系系统进行推理，并且我们通过研究自发手势来探索这种可能性。在两项研究中，参与者阅读了一篇描述正反馈和负反馈系统的书面课程，然后解释它们之间的差异。尽管该课程高度抽象且未指示人们做手势，但人们在解释过程中大量做出了空间手势。这些手势利用空间来表示简单的抽象关系（例如， ），有时还表示更复杂的关系结构（例如， ）。此外，在解释过程中，参与者的手势常常连贯成更大的关系结构类比模型。重要的是，手部明显的空间概念在很大程度上没有伴随着空间词汇。因此，手势表明即使在语言未体现时，空间类比在复杂关系推理中也很普遍。
