Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, The Netherlands.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Cognition. 2019 Jan;182:84-94. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.08.017. Epub 2018 Sep 13.
Many studies have shown that sentences implying an object to have a certain shape produce a robust reaction time advantage for shape-matching pictures in the sentence-picture verification task. Typically, this finding has been interpreted as evidence for perceptual simulation, i.e., that access to implicit shape information involves the activation of modality-specific visual processes. It follows from this proposal that disrupting visual processing during sentence comprehension should interfere with perceptual simulation and obliterate the match effect. Here we directly test this hypothesis. Participants listened to sentences while seeing either visual noise that was previously shown to strongly interfere with basic visual processing or a blank screen. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the match effect but crucially visual noise did not modulate it. When an interference technique was used that targeted high-level semantic processing (Experiment 3) however the match effect vanished. Visual noise specifically targeting high-level visual processes (Experiment 4) only had a minimal effect on the match effect. We conclude that the shape match effect in the sentence-picture verification paradigm is unlikely to rely on perceptual simulation.
许多研究表明，在句子-图片验证任务中，暗示某个物体具有特定形状的句子会为形状匹配的图片产生强大的反应时优势。通常，这一发现被解释为感知模拟的证据，即访问隐含的形状信息涉及到特定于模态的视觉过程的激活。根据这一建议，如果在句子理解过程中干扰视觉处理，就应该会干扰感知模拟并消除匹配效应。在这里，我们直接检验了这一假设。参与者在观看视觉噪声（先前已被证明会强烈干扰基本视觉处理）或空白屏幕的同时听句子。实验 1 和 2 复制了匹配效应，但关键是视觉噪声并没有调节它。然而，当使用针对高级语义处理的干扰技术（实验 3）时，匹配效应消失了。专门针对高级视觉过程的视觉噪声（实验 4）对匹配效应只有很小的影响。我们得出结论，句子-图片验证范式中的形状匹配效应不太可能依赖于感知模拟。
