Abstract.
Psycholinguistic research faces a major challenge in describing the mental representations readers construct from a text. It is now widely accepted that readers end with a representation of the situation described in the text. However, it is unclear whether this representation allows the activation of elements in accordance with their situation proximity. To answer this question, two experiments were conducted. Participants read texts, sentence by sentence, which gave them instructions about how to arrange items in a layout; they then performed a recognition task. By manipulating the spatial proximity between prime and probe items, this task allowed the measurement of a spatial priming effect. In the first experiment, a larger priming effect was observed for closer items on the spatial layout. The second experiment replicated these findings and showed that the priming effects are better explained by categorical distance than by Euclidean distance.
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Yves Bestgen is Research Associate of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. Vincent Dupont is supported by a Grant from the Belgian Federal Government (I.U.A.P. 4/19). We thank Mike Rinck, Michel Denis and an anonymous reviewer for their very useful comments on earlier versions of this article. We also thank Anne-Françoise Cabiaux for bringing Willa Cather's novel My Antonia to our attention.
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Bestgen, Y., Dupont, V. The construction of spatial situation models during reading. Psychological Research 67, 209–218 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-002-0111-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-002-0111-8