Szubielska Magdalena, Möhring Wenke
Institute of Psychology, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950, Lublin, Poland.
Faculty of Psychology, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 60/62, 4055, Basel, Switzerland.
Cogn Process. 2019 Nov;20(4):431-440. doi: 10.1007/s10339-019-00920-3. Epub 2019 May 3.
The current study investigated adults' spatial-scaling abilities using a haptic localization task. As a first aim, we examined the strategies used to solve this haptic task. Secondly, we explored whether irrelevant visual information influenced adults' spatial-scaling performance. Thirty-two adults were asked to locate targets as presented in maps on a larger or same-sized referent space. Maps varied in size in accordance with different scaling factors (1:4, 1:2, 1:1), whereas the referent space was constant in size throughout the experimental session. The availability of irrelevant, non-informative vision was manipulated by blindfolding half of the participants prior to the experiment (condition without non-informative vision), whereas the other half were able to see their surroundings with the stimuli being hidden behind a curtain (condition with non-informative vision). Analyses with absolute errors (after correcting for reversal errors) as the dependent variable revealed a significant interaction of the scaling factor and non-informative vision condition. Adults in the blindfolded condition showed constant errors and response times irrespective of scaling factor. Such a response pattern indicates the usage of relative strategies. Adults in the curtain condition showed a linear increase in errors with higher scaling factors, whereas their response times remained constant. This pattern of results supports the usage of absolute strategies or mental transformation strategies. Overall, our results indicate different scaling strategies depending on the availability of non-informative vision, highlighting the strong influence of (even irrelevant) vision on adults' haptic processing.
本研究使用触觉定位任务调查了成年人的空间缩放能力。作为首要目标，我们考察了用于解决此触觉任务的策略。其次，我们探究了无关视觉信息是否会影响成年人的空间缩放表现。32名成年人被要求在更大或相同尺寸的参照空间中定位地图上呈现的目标。地图大小根据不同的缩放因子（1:4、1:2、1:1）而变化，而参照空间在整个实验过程中大小保持不变。在实验前，通过蒙住一半参与者的眼睛来操控无关的、无信息视觉的可用性（无无信息视觉条件），而另一半参与者能够看到周围环境，刺激物则藏在帘子后面（有无信息视觉条件）。以绝对误差（校正反转误差后）作为因变量的分析显示，缩放因子和无信息视觉条件之间存在显著交互作用。蒙眼条件下的成年人无论缩放因子如何，都表现出恒定的误差和反应时间。这种反应模式表明使用了相对策略。帘子条件下的成年人随着缩放因子增大，误差呈线性增加，而他们的反应时间保持不变。这一结果模式支持了绝对策略或心理转换策略的使用。总体而言，我们的结果表明，根据无信息视觉的可用性不同，缩放策略也不同，突出了（即使是无关的）视觉对成年人触觉加工的强烈影响。
