Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Cis-Iscte, Av. das Forças Armadas, 1649-026, Lisbon, Portugal.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Aug;29(4):1426-1439. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02061-9. Epub 2022 Feb 7.
Previous findings from the sentence-picture verification task demonstrated that comprehenders simulate visual information about intrinsic attributes of described objects. Of interest is whether comprehenders may also simulate the setting in which an event takes place, such as, for example, the light information. To address this question, four experiments were conducted in which participants (total N = 412) either listened to (Experiment 1) or read (Experiment 3) sentences like "The sun is shining onto a bench" followed by a picture with the matching object (bench) and either the matching lighting condition of the scene (sunlit bench against the sunlit background) or the mismatching one (moonlit bench against the moonlit background). In both experiments, response times (RTs) were shorter when the lighting condition of the pictured scene matched the one implied in the sentence. However, no difference in RTs was observed when the processing of spoken sentences was interfered with visual noise (Experiment 2). Specifically, the results showed that visual interference disrupted incongruent visual content activated by listening to the sentences, as evidenced by faster responses on mismatching trials. Similarly, no difference in RTs was observed when the lighting condition of the pictured scene matched sentence context, but the target object presented for verification mismatched sentence context (Experiment 4). Thus, the locus of simulation effect is on the lighting representation of the target object rather than the lighting representation of the background. These findings support embodied and situated accounts of cognition, suggesting that comprehenders do not simulate objects independently of background settings.
先前的句子-图片验证任务的研究结果表明，理解者会模拟所描述物体的内在属性的视觉信息。人们感兴趣的是，理解者是否也可以模拟事件发生的环境，例如光线信息。为了回答这个问题，进行了四项实验，共有 412 名参与者（总计）参与了实验 1 的听力或实验 3 的阅读，他们听到或读到的句子是“太阳照在长椅上”，然后是一张与描述对象（长椅）匹配的图片，图片上的场景有匹配的照明条件（阳光普照的长椅在阳光背景下）或不匹配的照明条件（月光普照的长椅在月光背景下）。在这两个实验中，当图片场景的照明条件与句子中暗示的条件相匹配时，反应时间（RT）更短。然而，当处理口语句子时受到视觉噪声干扰时（实验 2），没有观察到 RT 的差异。具体来说，结果表明，视觉干扰破坏了通过听句子激活的不一致视觉内容，这表现为在不匹配的试验中反应更快。同样，当图片场景的照明条件与句子语境相匹配，但用于验证的目标对象与句子语境不匹配时（实验 4），也没有观察到 RT 的差异。因此，模拟效应的发生点是目标对象的照明表示，而不是背景的照明表示。这些发现支持认知的具身和情境化解释，表明理解者不会独立于背景环境来模拟对象。
