Hegarty M, Sims V K
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106.
Mem Cognit. 1994 Jul;22(4):411-30. doi: 10.3758/bf03200867.
In three experiments we tested the effects of spatial visualization ability on performance of a motion-verification task, in which subjects were shown a diagram of a mechanical system and were asked to verify a sentence stating the motion of one of the system components. We propose that this task involves component processes of (1) sentence comprehension, (2) diagram comprehension, (3) text-diagram integration, and (4) mental animation. Subjects with low spatial ability made more errors than did subjects with high spatial ability on this task, and they made more errors on items in which more system components had to be animated to solve the problem. In contrast, the high-spatial subjects were relatively accurate on all trials. These results indicate that spatial visualization is correlated with accuracy on the motion-verification task and suggest that this correlation is primarily due to the mental animation component of the task. Reaction time and eye-fixation data revealed no differences in how the high- and low-spatial subjects decomposed the task. The data of the two groups of subjects were equally consistent with a piecemeal model of mental animation, in which components are animated one by one in order of the causal chain of events in the system.
在三项实验中，我们测试了空间视觉化能力对一项运动验证任务表现的影响。在该任务中，向受试者展示一个机械系统的示意图，并要求他们验证一个陈述系统某一组件运动的句子。我们提出，这项任务涉及以下组成过程：（1）句子理解，（2）示意图理解，（3）文本 - 示意图整合，以及（4）心理动画。在这项任务中，空间能力低的受试者比空间能力高的受试者犯的错误更多，并且在解决问题时需要对更多系统组件进行动画处理的项目上犯的错误更多。相比之下，空间能力高的受试者在所有试验中都相对准确。这些结果表明，空间视觉化与运动验证任务的准确性相关，并表明这种相关性主要归因于该任务的心理动画组成部分。反应时间和眼动数据显示，空间能力高和低的受试者在分解任务的方式上没有差异。两组受试者的数据与心理动画的逐个处理模型同样一致，在该模型中，组件按照系统中事件的因果链顺序逐个进行动画处理。
