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Using spatial terms to select an object
1Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA. lcarlson@nd.edu
Memory & Cognition
|November 22, 2001
Summary
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.
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.
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