地震经历对插入空白间隔的汉字知觉干扰效应的影响

以插入空白间隔的汉字知觉干扰效应为实验范式, 探讨了不同长短的空白间隔对地震相关字和无关字的影响。结果发现：(1)在实验组中, 与地震无关字相比, 被试对地震相关字有更高的识别率; 而在对照组中, 被试对地震相关字和无关字的识别率差异不显著。(2) 450 ms的间隔能导致地震无关字干扰效应的消失, 却不会对地震相关字的识别造成干扰。本研究支持竞争激活假说, 并为情绪驱动知觉加工的观点提供证据。

Effect of Earthquake Experience on the Perceptual Interference with Unfilled Intervals in Chinese Characters

The perceptual interference effect states that a moderately degraded stimulus is less readily identified when depicted in a sequence of exposures from a highly degraded form than when presented all at once (standard condition). Thirty-two middle-school students from Mianzhu City (an earthquake-prone area), Sichuan province, China, were selected as major (experimental) participants, while thirty-two middle-school students from Beibei, Chongqing were chosen as control participants. This study, which consisted of two experiments (major and control), explored the effect of earthquake experience on the identification of Chinese characters with a paradigm of perceptual interference with unfilled interval (blank screen between exposures). The participants in each experiment were required to identify fragmented target characters in eight conditions by typing down the identity of each target. These conditions resulted from a within-participant design of 2 (material conditions: earthquake-related and unrelated characters) × 4 (presentation conditions, namely, three incremental conditions with interval durations of 0, 450, 900 ms, and the standard condition). These two experiments were combined into a dummy experiment of a mixed design for further analyses. Repeated measures analyses of variance were first conducted on percentages of the correct completion of target fragments. The major experiment indicated a significant difference in the performance between material conditions. The interference effect remained for earthquake-related characters in the critical 450 ms condition, while the effect for the unrelated characters disappeared. By contrast, the control experiment showed no difference in performance between material conditions. More critically, the results found no difference in the identification of the unrelated characters (i.e., recognition ability) between the control and major participants, yet the interference effect disappeared even for the earthquake-related characters in the 450 ms condition among the control participants. Based on these results, the identification performance of the participants with earthquake experience was higher on earthquake-related characters than the unrelated characters, and the perceptual interference for “normal” (unrelated) characters disappeared on the duration of 450 ms. However, the interference for the earthquake-related characters remained. The notion of persistent activation of representation cross unfilled intervals in the competitive activation model could explain why sometimes the interference occurred at the interval of 450 ms, and why sometimes it disappeared. The present study also supported the view that emotion (such as fear) drives perceptual processing.