Janczyk Markus, Ulrich Rolf
Department of Psychology, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2019 Jul;198:102850. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.05.002. Epub 2019 Jun 22.
According to the metaphoric mapping hypothesis, people code time in terms of space. Consistent with this hypothesis, several reaction time studies have demonstrated that participants respond faster with a left (right) response to stimuli that convey temporal information about the past (future) than when this stimulus-response mapping is reversed (past → right, future → left). The present experiment examines whether the side of the response key or of the (visual) action effect elicited by the response is the crucial factor of this space-time congruency effect. In a response-effect (R-E) compatible group, a response to a temporal stimulus produced a visual action effect on the same side as the response location (left response → left action effect, right response → right action effect). In an R-E incompatible group, however, response and action effect occurred on opposite sides (left response → right action effect, right response → left action effect). A typical space-time congruency effect was obtained in the R-E compatible group, but the congruency effect interacted with group and was descriptively reversed in the R-E incompatible group. This result pattern suggests that the typical congruency effect is determined by the location of the action consequences rather than the location of the response key. Based on this result, we suggest that the space-time congruency effect is based on an abstract spatial mental representation that embraces action events in the external space.
根据隐喻映射假说，人们依据空间来编码时间。与该假说一致的是，多项反应时研究表明，相较于刺激 - 反应映射颠倒的情况（过去→右，未来→左），参与者对传达过去（未来）时间信息的刺激做出左（右）反应时速度更快。本实验考察反应键的一侧或反应所引发的（视觉）动作效应的一侧是否是这种时空一致性效应的关键因素。在反应 - 效应（R - E）兼容组中，对时间刺激的反应在与反应位置相同的一侧产生视觉动作效应（左反应→左动作效应，右反应→右动作效应）。然而，在R - E不兼容组中，反应和动作效应出现在相反的两侧（左反应→右动作效应，右反应→左动作效应）。在R - E兼容组中获得了典型的时空一致性效应，但一致性效应与组别相互作用，并且在R - E不兼容组中从描述上看是相反的。这一结果模式表明，典型的一致性效应是由动作结果的位置而非反应键的位置决定的。基于这一结果，我们认为时空一致性效应基于一种抽象的空间心理表征，这种表征包含外部空间中的动作事件。
