Dural Seda, Burhanoǧlu Birce B, Ekinci Nilsu, Gürbüz Emre, Akın İdil U, Can Seda, Çetinkaya Hakan
Department of Psychology, İzmir University of Economics, İzmir, Turkey.
Department of Psychology, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey.
Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 14;9:1457. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01457. eCollection 2018.
Magnitude processing is of great interest to researchers because it requires integration of quantity related information in memory regardless of whether the focus is numerical or non-numerical magnitudes. The previous work has suggested an interplay between pre-existing semantic information about number-space relationship in processes of encoding and recall. Investigation of the compatibility between physical stimulus size - spatial position and false recognition may provide valuable information about the cognitive representation of non-numerical magnitudes. Therefore, we applied a false memory procedure to a series of non-numerical stimulus pairs. Three versions of the pairs were used: big-right (a big character on the right/a small character on the left), big-left (a big character on the left/a small character on the right), and equal-sized (an equal sized character on each side). In the first phase, participants ( = 100) received 27 pairs, with nine pairs from each experimental condition. In the second phase, nine pairs from each of three stimulus categories were presented: (1) original pairs that were presented in the first phase, (2) mirrored pairs that were horizontally flipped versions of the pairs presented in the first phase, and (3) novel pairs that had not been presented before. The participants were instructed to press "YES" for the pairs that they remembered seeing before and to press "NO" for the pairs that they did not remember from the first phase. The results indicated that the participants made more false-alarm responses by responding "yes" to the pairs with the bigger one on the right. Moreover, they responded to the previously seen figures with the big one on the right faster compared to their distracting counterparts. The study provided evidence for the relationship between stimulus physical size and how they processed spatially by employing a false memory procedure. We offered a size-space compatibility account based on the congruency between the short- and long-term associations which produce local compatibilities. Accordingly, the compatible stimuli in the learning phase might be responsible for the interference, reflecting a possible short-term interference effect on congruency between the short- and long-term associations. Clearly, future research is required to test this speculative position.
量级处理引起了研究人员的极大兴趣，因为它需要在记忆中整合与数量相关的信息，而不管重点是数字量级还是非数字量级。先前的研究表明，在编码和回忆过程中，关于数字-空间关系的预先存在的语义信息之间存在相互作用。研究物理刺激大小-空间位置与错误识别之间的兼容性，可能会为非数字量级的认知表征提供有价值的信息。因此，我们将错误记忆程序应用于一系列非数字刺激对。使用了三种版本的刺激对：大-右（右边是一个大字符/左边是一个小字符）、大-左（左边是一个大字符/右边是一个小字符）和等大小（两边是等大小的字符）。在第一阶段，参与者（n = 100）接受27对刺激，每个实验条件有9对。在第二阶段，呈现来自三个刺激类别的每类中的9对：（1）第一阶段呈现的原始对，（2）第一阶段呈现的对的水平翻转版本的镜像对，以及（3）之前未呈现过的新对。参与者被指示对他们记得之前见过的对按“是”，对他们不记得在第一阶段出现过的对按“否”。结果表明，参与者对右边有较大刺激的对做出“是”的反应时，做出了更多的误报反应。此外，与干扰性刺激相比，他们对之前见过的右边有较大刺激的图形的反应更快。该研究通过采用错误记忆程序，为刺激物理大小与它们在空间上的处理方式之间的关系提供了证据。我们基于产生局部兼容性的短期和长期关联之间的一致性，提出了一个大小-空间兼容性解释。因此，学习阶段中的兼容刺激可能是干扰的原因，反映了对短期和长期关联之间一致性的可能短期干扰效应。显然，需要未来的研究来检验这一推测性观点。
