Greco Alberto
Department of Educational Sciences, Cognilab, Laboratory of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2021 Apr 9;12:647899. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.647899. eCollection 2021.
The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is often taken as supporting the fundamental role of the motor system in understanding sentences that describe actions. This effect would be related to an internal "simulation," i.e., the reactivation of past perceptual and motor experiences. However, it is not easy to establish whether this simulation predominantly involves spatial imagery or motor anticipation. In the classical ACE experiments, where a real motor response is required, the direction and motor representations are mixed. In order to disentangle spatial and motor aspects involved in the ACE, we performed six experiments in different conditions, where the motor component was always reduced, asking participants to judge the sensibility of sentences by moving a mouse, thus requiring a purely spatial representation, compatible with nonmotor interpretations. In addition, our experiments had the purpose of taking into account the possible confusion of effects of practice and of compatibility (i.e., differences in reaction times simultaneously coming from block order and opposite motion conditions). Also, in contrast to the usual paradigm, we included no-transfer filler sentences in the analysis. The ACE was not found in any experiment, a result that failed to support the idea that the ACE could be related to a simulation where spatial aspects rather than motor ones prevail. Strong practice effects were always found and were carved out from results. A surprising effect was that no-transfer sentences were processed much slower than others, perhaps revealing a sort of participants' awareness of the structure of stimuli, i.e., their finding that some of them involved motion and others did not. The relevance of these outcomes for the embodiment theory is discussed.
动作句兼容性效应（ACE）通常被视为支持运动系统在理解描述动作的句子中所起的基本作用。这种效应可能与一种内部“模拟”有关，即过去感知和运动体验的重新激活。然而，要确定这种模拟主要涉及空间意象还是运动预期并不容易。在经典的ACE实验中，由于需要实际的运动反应，方向和运动表征是混合的。为了厘清ACE中涉及的空间和运动方面，我们在不同条件下进行了六项实验，在这些实验中，运动成分始终被减少，要求参与者通过移动鼠标来判断句子的合理性，从而需要一种纯粹的空间表征，这与非运动解释是相符的。此外，我们的实验旨在考虑到练习和兼容性效应可能产生的混淆（即反应时间的差异同时来自组块顺序和相反的运动条件）。而且，与通常的范式不同，我们在分析中纳入了无迁移填充句。在任何实验中都未发现ACE，这一结果未能支持ACE可能与一种以空间方面而非运动方面为主导的模拟有关的观点。我们总是发现了强烈的练习效应，并从结果中剔除了这些效应。一个令人惊讶的效应是，无迁移句子的处理速度比其他句子慢得多，这可能揭示了参与者对刺激结构的某种意识，即他们发现其中一些句子涉及运动而另一些则不涉及。本文讨论了这些结果对具身理论的相关性。
