Hoeben Mannaert Lara N, Dijkstra Katinka, Zwaan Rolf A
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Mandeville Building, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Mem Cognit. 2017 Aug;45(6):974-982. doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0708-1.
Research suggests that language comprehenders simulate visual features such as shape during language comprehension. In sentence-picture verification tasks, whenever pictures match the shape or orientation implied by the previous sentence, responses are faster than when the pictures mismatch implied visual aspects. However, mixed results have been demonstrated when the sentence-picture paradigm was applied to color (Connell, Cognition, 102(3), 476-485, 2007; Zwaan & Pecher, PLOS ONE, 7(12), e51382, 2012). One of the aims of the current investigation was to resolve this issue. This was accomplished by conceptually replicating the original study on color, using the same paradigm but a different stimulus set. The second goal of this study was to assess how much perceptual information is included in a mental simulation. We examined this by reducing color saturation, a manipulation that does not sacrifice object identifiability. If reduction of one aspect of color does not alter the match effect, it would suggest that not all perceptual information is relevant for a mental simulation. Our results did not support this: We found a match advantage when objects were shown at normal levels of saturation, but this match advantage disappeared when saturation was reduced, yet still aided in object recognition compared to when color was entirely removed. Taken together, these results clearly show a strong match effect for color, and the perceptual richness of mental simulations during language comprehension.
研究表明，语言理解者在语言理解过程中会模拟诸如形状等视觉特征。在句子-图片验证任务中，只要图片与前一句所隐含的形状或方向相匹配，反应速度就会比图片与隐含的视觉方面不匹配时更快。然而，当句子-图片范式应用于颜色时，结果却参差不齐（康奈尔，《认知》，第102卷第3期，第476 - 485页，2007年；兹万和佩彻，《公共科学图书馆·综合》，第7卷第12期，e51382，2012年）。当前调查的目的之一就是解决这个问题。这是通过在概念上重复关于颜色的原始研究来实现的，使用相同的范式但不同的刺激集。本研究的第二个目标是评估心理模拟中包含了多少感知信息。我们通过降低颜色饱和度来进行研究，这种操作不会牺牲物体的可识别性。如果颜色某一方面的降低不会改变匹配效应，那就表明并非所有感知信息都与心理模拟相关。我们的结果并不支持这一点：我们发现当物体以正常饱和度水平呈现时存在匹配优势，但当饱和度降低时，这种匹配优势消失了，不过与完全去除颜色相比，饱和度降低时仍有助于物体识别。综上所述，这些结果清楚地表明颜色存在强烈的匹配效应，以及语言理解过程中心理模拟的感知丰富性。
