322,880 research outputs found
Spatial text processing: are estimates of time and distance influenced by the age of characters and readers?
No full textIt is widely accepted that, while hearing or reading a story, people continuously form and update mental representations of the characters, places and events being described, based on plausible spatial, temporal or intentional details. According to the embodied cognition approach, the mental representations that accompany text reading are grounded in each reader's own sensorimotor experiences. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether readers' estimates of time and distance are influenced by age, their own and that of the character being described. In Experiment 1, 182 young adults read the description of a route in a town being covered by a young or an elderly character. In Experiment 2, the same descriptions as in Experiment 1 were read by 121 young adults and 53 older people. To avoid a possible confound, a follow-up to Experiment 1 (Experiment 1a) repeated the study by removing from texts the adverbs describing the walking speed of characters. In all experiments, participants were asked to estimate: (a) the time the characters took to reach their destinations (time estimation task); and (b) the distance they covered (distance estimation task). The results showed that both characters' and readers' ages influenced the time estimated, whereas no effects were found on estimates of distance: the elderly character was estimated to take longer than the young character (Experiments 1, 1a and 2), and older readers estimated longer times than younger readers (Experiment 2). This prompts the conclusion that personal features of both the readers and the characters they read about were used to infer the temporal dimension of situations described in the narratives. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed
Categorization and sensorimotor interaction with objects.
No full textThree experiments were aimed at verifying whether the modality of interaction with objects and the goals defined by the task influences the weight of the properties used for categorization. In Experiment 1 we used everyday objects (cups and glasses), in order to exclude that the results depended on pre-stored categorical knowledge and to assess the role of a purely perceptual property such as colour. Novel objects were used respectively in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3. Participants experienced objects in different modalities of interaction: Vision, Vision+Action, Action, and Mirror (they observed an experimenter touching and lifting them), then they were submitted to a similarity evaluation task and to a more action-based sorting task. Objects varied in intrinsic properties which had a different degree of interactivity: Grip, Shape, Size and Colour. Overall Grip, the most interactive property, was relevant for categorization, together with Size in Experiment 1 and with Shape in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3. The relevance of Grip in the sorting task confirms that goal-relevant properties are more weighted. The absence of a modality effect is discussed in the framework of the theories arguing that the vision of objects and of conspecifics interacting with objects automatically activates motor information
Visual and kinaesthetic strategies in mental scanning of spatial images generated from locomotion
No full textSpatial memory and large-scale ecological environments
No full textSpatial memory is a necessary prerequisite of most everyday activities. We usually define “spatial” that information useful to locate objects and to interact with them. Therefore, it is “spatial” information about relational and metric properties, such as relative positions (e.g., left/right), distance, size, orientation, as well as dynamic properties, such as velocity and strength. Clearly, the ability to navigate in the environment requires an understanding of all these properties and a representation in memory of structured information. To organize spatial memory, egocentric (i.e. based on body’s position) or allocentric (i.e. based on external positions) frames of reference are used. Although research on spatial memory has a long history, in the majority of the cases experimental settings and procedures are restricted to laboratory situations, and the results are typically generalized to real world contexts. Consequently, little is known on the characteristics of spatial memory based on bodily interactions with large-scale everyday environments. In this paper we review evidence about laboratory-based and environment-based research on spatial memory. Further, a research is presented that investigated whether familiarity with a large-scale regular environment affects the spatial frames of reference necessary to represent it in memory. It was tested the hypothesis that familiarity facilitates an allocentric representation of the environment. Familiar and unfamiliar participants had to study 5 triads of buildings by walking along a path surrounding each triad. Afterwards, they had to provide relative distance judgments in relation either to their body (egocentric) or external buildings (allocentric). Results showed that familiar participants were more accurate than unfamiliar participants in the allocentric judgments and faster on the whole. Unfamiliar participants performed similarly in both judgments and were better than familiar participants in the egocentric judgments. These findings suggest that when the environment is familiar and regular it is represented on the basis of allocentric frames of reference. The results are discussed in relation to models of spatial memory that emphasize the importance of experience and of the geometric structure
Coping strategies and cognitive functioning in elderly people from a rural community
No full textStressful situations may produce pathological states in the capacity to face harmful events in elderly people. This study investigates the relationships between the capacity to adopt appropriate coping strategies, the ability to transform circumstances to personal preferences or to adjust personal preferences to situational constraints, and the efficiency of cognitive functioning in the elderly. A sample of 121 residents drawn from a rural community in Southern Italy were administered the MMSE, the Tenacious Goal Pursuit, Flexible Goal Adjustment and Coping Inventory for Stressful Situation questionnaires. Results suggest that the capacity to face stressful situations is closely linked to an efficient cognitive functioning and to approaches to coping that ensure a wide range of solutions
Flanker interference effects in a line bisection task.
No full textPrevious studies have shown that flanking distracters influence line bisection. In the present study, we examined if reaching the flanker after bisecting the line resulted in a variation of flanker interference on line bisection. Right- and left-handed participants were asked to bisect a horizontal line flanked by a dot (bisection task, B-task) or to bisect the line and then to reach the dot (bisection plus reaching task, BR-task). The dot was placed laterally to, and above or below, the line edge. The results showed that in both tasks the subjective midpoint was shifted away from the position of the dot. However, this effect was greater in the BR-task than in the B-task. We suggest that the requirement to perform an action to the flanker in the BR-task induced participants to pay more attention to the dot, enhancing its salience and distorting effects on line bisection
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