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Using spatial terms to select an object.

L A Carlson1, G D Logan

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA. lcarlson@nd.edu

Memory & Cognition
|November 22, 2001
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Adding a distractor object does not affect how people understand spatial terms like "above." This suggests distractors influence initial object identification, not spatial computation.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Spatial Cognition

Background:

  • Object selection from cluttered scenes is common.
  • Spatial terms (e.g., "above") guide selection by relating objects.
  • Previous research often used displays with only two objects.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of a distractor object on the apprehension of spatial terms.
  • To determine if distractor presence affects the processing of spatial language.

Main Methods:

  • Acceptability-rating tasks were used to assess sentence comprehension.
  • Speeded sentence/picture verification tasks measured processing speed.
  • Displays included a located object, a reference object, and a distractor object.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Distractor presence consistently affected apprehension across tasks.
  • The distractor's impact was independent of its location in the display.
  • These effects suggest distractors influence early object indexing processes.

Conclusions:

  • Distractors interfere with the initial spatial indexing and identification of objects.
  • The computation of spatial terms appears to operate solely on the intended located and reference objects.
  • Understanding spatial language in cluttered environments involves distinct processing stages.