Conceptual spatial compatibility effects are accounted for by symbolic compatibility principles

What is it about?

In two different semantic decision tasks we observed: - an effect of the compatibility between the typical location of the referent of the to-be-judged word in the real world and the the physical location of either the response in the response device or the target word on the screen (e.g., faster responses when the word "eagle" was responded to with the upper of two keys or when it was presented in the upper part of the screen), which disappeared when stimulus physical location was presented in a blocked design (i.e., it was kept constant within each block of trials) - an effect of the compatibility between the linguistic markedness/polarity of the stimulus semantic category and the response position (i.e., faster right and left responses to wordes refferring to living and nonliving entities, respectively). This effect is anlogous to the MARC effect in the number domain. Al these effects can be explained by the same (polarity compatibility) principle

Featured Image

Why is it important?

S-S and S-R compatibility effects between physical and representational locations in word categorization tasks can be accounted for by symbolic compatibility principles. A MARC-like effect can be observed in non-numerical domains.

Perspectives