Department of Psychology, Yale University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2024 Sep;153(9):2230-2238. doi: 10.1037/xge0001618. Epub 2024 Jul 18.
Given a maze (e.g., in a book of puzzles), you might solve it by drawing out paths with your pencil. But even without a pencil, you might naturally find yourself tracing along various paths. This "mental path tracing" may intuitively seem to depend on your (overt, conscious, voluntary) goal of wanting to get out of the maze, but might it also occur spontaneously-as a result of simply the maze, via a kind of dynamic visual routine? Here, observers simply had to compare the visual properties of two probes presented in a maze. The maze itself was entirely task irrelevant, but we predicted that simply the maze's visual structure would "afford" incidental mental path tracing (à la Gibson). Across four experiments, observers were slower to compare probes that were further from each other along the paths, even when controlling for lower level properties (such as the probes' brute linear separation, ignoring the maze "walls"). These results also generalized beyond mazes to other unfamiliar displays with task-irrelevant circular obstacles. This novel combination of two prominent themes from our field-affordances and visual routines-suggests that at least some visual routines may not require voluntary goals; instead, they may operate in an automatic (incidental, stimulus-driven) fashion, as a part of visual processing itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
给定一个迷宫（例如，在一本拼图书中），你可以用铅笔画出路径来解决它。但是，即使没有铅笔，你也可能自然而然地发现自己在沿着各种路径追踪。这种“心理路径追踪”似乎直观上取决于你（明显的、有意识的、自愿的）想要走出迷宫的目标，但它是否也会自发地出现——仅仅是由于迷宫的存在，通过一种动态的视觉常规？在这里，观察者只需比较在迷宫中呈现的两个探针的视觉属性。迷宫本身与任务完全无关，但我们预测，仅仅是迷宫的视觉结构就会“提供”偶然的心理路径追踪（类似于 Gibson）。在四个实验中，即使在控制较低层次的属性（例如探针的粗暴线性分离，忽略迷宫“墙壁”）的情况下，观察者比较沿着路径彼此相距较远的探针也会更慢。这些结果也超出了迷宫，推广到其他具有任务无关的圆形障碍物的不熟悉的显示器。我们领域的两个突出主题——可供性和视觉常规的新颖组合——表明，至少一些视觉常规可能不需要自愿的目标；相反，它们可能以自动（偶然的、受刺激驱动的）方式运行，作为视觉处理本身的一部分。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2024 APA，保留所有权利）。
