Schaeffner Simone, Koch Iring, Philipp Andrea M
RWTH Aachen University, Institute of Psychology, Jägerstrasse 17-19, 52056, Aachen, Germany.
Psychol Res. 2018 Sep;82(5):955-969. doi: 10.1007/s00426-017-0872-8. Epub 2017 May 24.
Previous research has indicated that modality switching is considerably affected by modality compatibility. It has been shown that switch costs are higher for switching between relatively incompatible sensory-motor modality mappings (i.e., auditory-manual and visual-vocal) compared to switching between compatible mappings (i.e., auditory-vocal and visual-manual). So far, however, it has been unclear whether these findings are influenced by learning processes resulting from very small stimulus sets and a large number of stimulus repetitions. In the present study, we investigated the role of learning concept-to-category associations (Experiment 1) as well as influences of learning concept-to-modality mappings (Experiment 2) on sensory-motor modality switching in semantic categorizations. The results of both experiments revealed shorter overall reaction times due to learning. Additionally, learning of concept-to-category associations (Experiment 1) led to a significant reduction of modality switch costs. Interestingly, however, modality-compatibility effects were neither significantly influenced by learning of concept-to-category associations nor by learning of concept-to-modality mappings. Thus, the present study provides first evidence that learning on the semantic level influences modality switching but it does not significantly affect modality compatibility.
先前的研究表明，模态转换受模态兼容性的影响很大。研究表明，与兼容映射（即听觉-发声和视觉-手动）之间的转换相比，相对不兼容的感觉运动模态映射（即听觉-手动和视觉-发声）之间的转换成本更高。然而，到目前为止，尚不清楚这些发现是否受到极小刺激集和大量刺激重复所导致的学习过程的影响。在本研究中，我们调查了学习概念到类别的关联（实验1）以及学习概念到模态的映射（实验2）在语义分类中对感觉运动模态转换的作用。两个实验的结果均显示，由于学习，总体反应时间缩短。此外，学习概念到类别的关联（实验1）导致模态转换成本显著降低。然而，有趣的是，模态兼容性效应既没有受到概念到类别的关联学习的显著影响，也没有受到概念到模态的映射学习的显著影响。因此，本研究首次证明，语义层面的学习会影响模态转换，但不会显著影响模态兼容性。
