Montefinese Maria, Hallam Glyn, Thompson Hannah Elizabeth, Jefferies Elizabeth
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Mar;73(3):384-395. doi: 10.1177/1747021819877163. Epub 2019 Sep 25.
Neuropsychological studies suggest a distinction between (a) semantic knowledge and (b) control processes that shape the retrieval of conceptual information to suit the task or context. These aspects of semantic cognition are specifically impaired in patients with semantic dementia and semantic aphasia, respectively. However, interactions between the structure of knowledge and control processes that are expected during semantic retrieval have not been fully characterised. In particular, domain-general executive resources may not have equal relevance for the capacity to promote weak yet task relevant features (i.e., "controlled retrieval) and to ignore or suppress distracting information (i.e., "selection"). Here, using a feature selection task, we tested the contribution of featural relevance to semantic performance in healthy participants under conditions of divided attention. Healthy participants showed greater dual-task disruption as the relevance value of the distractor feature linearly increased, supporting the emerging view that semantic relevance is one of the organising principles of the structure of semantic representation. Moreover, word frequency, and inter-correlational strength affected overall performance, but they did not show an interaction with dual-task conditions. These results suggest that domain-general control processes, disrupted by divided attention, are more important to the capacity to efficiently avoid distracting information during semantic decision-making than to the promotion of weak target features. The present study therefore provides novel information about the nature of the interaction between structured conceptual knowledge and control processes that support the retrieval of appropriate information and relates these results to a new theoretical framework, termed controlled semantic cognition.
神经心理学研究表明，（a）语义知识与（b）控制过程之间存在区别，控制过程塑造概念信息的检索以适应任务或情境。语义认知的这些方面在语义性痴呆和语义性失语症患者中分别受到特异性损害。然而，语义检索过程中预期的知识结构与控制过程之间的相互作用尚未得到充分描述。特别是，领域通用的执行资源对于促进微弱但与任务相关的特征（即“控制性检索”）以及忽略或抑制干扰信息（即“选择”）的能力可能没有同等的相关性。在此，我们使用特征选择任务，测试了在注意力分散的条件下，特征相关性对健康参与者语义表现的贡献。随着干扰特征的相关性值线性增加，健康参与者表现出更大的双任务干扰，这支持了一种新出现的观点，即语义相关性是语义表征结构的组织原则之一。此外，词频和相互关联强度影响整体表现，但它们与双任务条件没有显示出相互作用。这些结果表明，注意力分散所破坏的领域通用控制过程，对于在语义决策过程中有效避免干扰信息的能力比促进微弱目标特征的能力更为重要。因此，本研究提供了关于结构化概念知识与支持适当信息检索的控制过程之间相互作用性质的新信息，并将这些结果与一个新的理论框架联系起来，该框架称为控制性语义认知。
