Horchak Oleksandr V, Garrido Margarida Vaz
Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social, Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Front Psychol. 2020 Dec 23;11:583814. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.583814. eCollection 2020.
Many studies showed that comprehenders monitor changes in protagonists' emotions and actions. This article reports two experiments that explored how focusing comprehenders' attention on a particular property of the protagonist dimension (e.g., emotional or action state) affects the accessibility of information about target objects mentioned in the sentence. Furthermore, the present research examined whether participants' attitudes toward the issues described in the sentence can modulate comprehension processes. To this end, we asked participants to read sentences about environmental issues that focused comprehenders' attention on different mental and physical attributes of the same entities (protagonists and objects) and then self-report their own thoughts on the topic of environment by responding to the items assessing their environmental awareness. Importantly, we manipulated the task requirements across two experiments by administering a self-report task (Experiment 1), which required the participants to rate the seriousness and the frequency of the problem mentioned in a sentence; and administering a sentence-picture verification paradigm (Experiment 2), which required the participants to merely indicate if the object depicted in the picture (related to a certain environmental problem) was mentioned in the preceding sentence. The results of these experiments suggest that the focus of a sentence on the environmental problem (rather than the protagonist's emotion and action) enhances the accessibility of information about environmental issues (e.g., plastic garbage); that the comprehender's level of environmental awareness influences one's attention during sentence processing; and that comprehender characteristics significantly modulate comprehension processes only when the measures tap into explicit (and not implicit) processes.
许多研究表明，阅读理解者会监测主人公情绪和行为的变化。本文报告了两项实验，探究了将阅读理解者的注意力集中在主人公维度的特定属性（例如情绪或行为状态）上如何影响句子中提到的目标物体信息的可及性。此外，本研究还考察了参与者对句子中所描述问题的态度是否会调节理解过程。为此，我们要求参与者阅读关于环境问题的句子，这些句子将阅读理解者的注意力集中在相同实体（主人公和物体）的不同心理和物理属性上，然后通过回答评估其环境意识的项目来自我报告他们对环境主题的想法。重要的是，我们在两项实验中通过实施一项自我报告任务（实验1）来操纵任务要求，该任务要求参与者对句子中提到的问题的严重性和频率进行评分；以及实施一个句子-图片验证范式（实验2），该范式要求参与者仅指出图片中描绘的物体（与某个环境问题相关）是否在前一句中被提及。这些实验的结果表明，句子对环境问题的关注（而非主人公的情绪和行为）增强了关于环境问题（例如塑料垃圾）信息的可及性；阅读理解者的环境意识水平会影响句子处理过程中的注意力；并且只有当测量方法涉及显性（而非隐性）过程时，阅读理解者的特征才会显著调节理解过程。
