Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced.
Department of Psychology, Mississippi State University.
Cogn Sci. 2023 Aug;47(8):e13327. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13327.
Informed by theories of embodied cognition, in the present study, we designed a novel priming technique to investigate the impact of spatial diversity and script direction on searching through concepts in both English and Persian (i.e., two languages with opposite script directions). First, participants connected a target dot either to one other dot (linear condition) or to multiple other dots (diverse condition) and either from left to right (rightward condition) or from right to left (leftward condition) on a computer touchscreen using their dominant hand's forefinger. Following the spatial prime, they were asked to generate as many words as possible using two-letter cues (e.g., "lo" → "love," "lobster") in 20 s. We hypothesized that greater spatial diversity, and consistency with script direction, should facilitate conceptual search and result in a higher number of word productions. In both languages, word production performance was superior for the diverse prime relative to the linear prime, suggesting that searching through lexical memory is facilitated by spatial diversity. Although some effects were observed for the directionality of the spatial prime, they were not consistent across experiments and did not correlate with script direction. This pattern of results suggests that a spatial prime that promotes diverse paths can improve word retrieval from lexical memory and lends empirical support to the embodied cognition framework, in which spatial relations play a crucial role in the conceptual system.
受具身认知理论的启发，本研究设计了一种新颖的启动技术，以调查空间多样性和脚本方向对英语和波斯语（即两种脚本方向相反的语言）中概念搜索的影响。首先，参与者使用惯用手的食指在计算机触摸屏上连接一个目标点与另一个点（线性条件）或多个点（多样条件），并从左到右（右向条件）或从右到左（左向条件）。在空间启动后，他们被要求在 20 秒内使用两个字母的提示（例如，“lo”→“love”，“lobster”）生成尽可能多的单词。我们假设更大的空间多样性和与脚本方向的一致性应该促进概念搜索，并导致更多的单词生成。在两种语言中，相对于线性启动，多样启动的单词生成表现更好，这表明通过空间多样性促进了词汇记忆搜索。尽管对于空间启动的方向性观察到了一些影响，但它们在实验中并不一致，也与脚本方向无关。这种结果模式表明，促进多样化路径的空间启动可以改善词汇记忆中的单词检索，并为具身认知框架提供实证支持，其中空间关系在概念系统中起着关键作用。
