University of Tübingen, Germany.
University of Tübingen, Germany.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2021 Mar;214:103266. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103266. Epub 2021 Feb 18.
The processing of negation is typically regarded as one of the most demanding cognitive processes as it often involves the reversal of input information. As negation is also regarded as a core linguistic process, to date, investigations of negation have typically been linguistic in nature. However, negation is a standard operator also within non-linguistic domains. For example, traffic signs often use negation to indicate a prohibition of specific actions (e.g., no left turn). In the current study, we investigate whether processing difficulties that are typically reported within the linguistic domain generalize to pictorial negation. Across two experiments, linguistic negation and pictorial negation were directly compared to their affirmative counterparts. In line with the literature, the results show that there is a general processing benefit for pictorial input. Most interestingly, the core process of negation also benefits from the pictorial input. Specifically, the processing difficulty in pictorial negation compared to affirmation is less pronounced than within the linguistic domain, especially concerning error rates. In the current experiments, pictorial negation did not result in increased error rates compared to the affirmative condition. Overall, the current results suggest that negation in pictorial conditions also results in a slowing of information processing. However, the use of pictorial negation can ease processing difficulty over linguistic negation.
否定的处理通常被认为是最具挑战性的认知过程之一，因为它通常涉及输入信息的反转。由于否定也被视为一种核心的语言过程，迄今为止，对否定的研究通常具有语言性质。然而，否定也是非语言领域的标准运算符。例如，交通标志经常使用否定来表示对特定行为的禁止（例如，禁止左转）。在当前的研究中，我们调查了在语言领域中通常报告的处理困难是否会推广到图像否定。在两个实验中，我们直接比较了语言否定和图像否定与其肯定对应物。与文献一致的是，结果表明，图像输入具有普遍的处理优势。最有趣的是，否定的核心过程也受益于图像输入。具体来说，与语言领域相比，图像否定与肯定相比的处理难度不那么明显，尤其是在错误率方面。在当前的实验中，与肯定条件相比，图像否定并没有导致错误率增加。总的来说，当前的结果表明，图像条件下的否定也会导致信息处理速度减慢。然而，使用图像否定可以减轻语言否定的处理难度。
