不同时间关注点下的空间-时间联合编码效应

The Modulation of Temporal Focus on the Effect of Spatial-Temporal Association of Response Codes

本研究旨在探讨不同时间关注特征人群的空间-时间联合编码效应是否存在差异。采用时间关注点量表将被试分为关注过去组和关注未来组,进行反应区分实验。实验以时间词作为启动刺激,目标刺激是随后出现在屏幕左或右侧的圆点。结果发现,不同时间关注点人群在不同时间词、空间位置实验条件下的反应不同,关注过去组对左侧空间反应更快,关注未来组在未来词启动下的反应时更短。表明不同时间关注点人群分别在时间和空间维度上存在差异,没有直接发现相反的时间-空间表征形式,但可能具有该趋势。这种区别可能由于注意分配上的差异,在一定程度上支持"左-右"轴上时间概念加工的时间关注点假设。

Is the spatial-temporal association of response codes （ STEARC ） effect affected by subjective temporal characteristics？ In this study, weinvestigate whether temporal focus is one of the influencing factors of the STEARC effect. Results of the spatial-temporal metaphor suggests thatthere＇s a left-to-right mental time line in our mind. However, studies have found that the pattern and the direction of this effect may be influenced bycultural features （mainly reading and writing direction） or experimental conditions （by priming tasks）. In other words, the STEARC effects are notthe same as those in the performance of people with different reading/writing directions or in different experimental priming conditions. Recently,researches proposed a temporal-focus hypothesis People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that theirculture （or temporal personality） is future-oriented or past-oriented. Hence, we hypothesized that participants with different temPoral focuses alsoshowed different responses in the left-right horizontal axis of time. The Temporal Focus Scale （TFS） was used to divide the participants into two groups, temporal focus towards the past and focus towards thefuture. After this step, a total of 56 undergraduate and graduate students （28 focused towards the past, 28 focused towards the future） were qualified toparticipate the modified response-discrimination paradigm experiment. In this experiment, participants were asked to respond by pressing the key （ P orQ ） on the computer keyboard, to both different locus of a point and different meanings of temporal words. Forty-two temporal words of Chinese wereused, half of them referring to past time and the other half referring to future time. The experiment was conducted with a 2 （point location： left/right） 2 （temporal reference： past/future） x 2 （temporal focus： past/future） between-subjects design, to examine whether people with different temporalfoci would show a different pattern of temporal-spatial representation. The hypothesis was that responses were faster when the test requirements wereconsistent with individuals＇ temporal focus, whereas it may take longer response time if the experimental conditions were at odds with their temporalfocus. The results showed that there was a tendency of the diversity on the STEARC effect by distinguishing participants into different temporal foci.Specifically, persons with temporal focus towards the past judged faster to ＂left＂, and persons with temporal focus towards the future responded fasterin the prime of ＂future＂. Different levels of attention allocation may be the reason that temporal focus affected the temporal-spatial metaphor. Althoughwe didn＇t test our assumption directly, this hypothetical co-processing pattern between the STEARC effect and temporal focus conformed to theCoherent Working Models. And the null result was because of the modest effectiveness of our scale or paradigm. In conclusion, these findings provideevidence that the temporal-focus hypothesis between time and space observed in fore-behind axis may exist in left-right axis of the STEARC effect.Thus, in the future, researchers could investigate this issue further using other paradigms to test whether our results are valid.