Boyer Ty W, Maouene Josita, Sethuraman Nitya
Department of Psychology, Georgia Southern University, P.O. Box 8041, Statesboro, GA, 30460-8041, USA.
Psychology Department, Grand Valley State University, 1 Campus Dr, AuSable Hall, Allendale, MI, 49401, USA.
Cogn Process. 2017 May;18(2):195-203. doi: 10.1007/s10339-017-0792-y. Epub 2017 Feb 9.
Theories of embodied conceptual meaning suggest fundamental relations between others' actions, language, and our own actions and visual attention processes. Prior studies have found that when people view an image of a neutral body in a scene they first look toward, in order, the head, torso, hands, and legs. Other studies show associations between action verbs and the body-effectors used in performing the action (e.g., "jump" with feet/legs; "talk" with face/head). In the present experiment, the visual attention of participants was recorded with a remote eye-tracking system while they viewed an image of an actor pantomiming an action and heard a concrete action verb. Participants manually responded whether or not the action image was a good example of the verb they heard. The eye-tracking results confirmed that participants looked at the head most, followed by the hands, and the feet least of all; however, visual attention to each of the body-parts also varied as a function of the effector associated with the spoken verb on image/verb congruent trials, particularly for verbs associated with the legs. Overall, these results suggest that language influences some perceptual processes; however, hearing auditory verbs did not alter the previously reported fundamental hierarchical sequence of directed attention, and fixations on specific body-effectors may not be essential for verb comprehension as peripheral visual cues may be sufficient to perform the task.
具身概念意义理论表明他人的动作、语言与我们自己的动作及视觉注意过程之间存在着基本关系。先前的研究发现，当人们在场景中观看一个中性身体的图像时，他们首先依次看向头部、躯干、手部和腿部。其他研究表明动作动词与执行该动作时所使用的身体效应器之间存在关联（例如，“跳”与脚/腿相关；“说”与脸/头相关）。在本实验中，当参与者观看一个演员模仿动作的图像并听到一个具体的动作动词时，用远程眼动追踪系统记录他们的视觉注意力。参与者手动回答该动作图像是否是他们所听到动词的一个好例子。眼动追踪结果证实，参与者看向头部的次数最多，其次是手部，看向脚部的次数最少；然而，在图像/动词匹配试验中，对身体各部位的视觉注意力也会因与口语动词相关的效应器的不同而有所变化，特别是对于与腿部相关的动词。总体而言，这些结果表明语言会影响一些感知过程；然而，听到听觉动词并没有改变先前报道的定向注意力的基本层次顺序，并且对特定身体效应器的注视对于动词理解可能不是必需的，因为周边视觉线索可能足以完成任务。
