Biomedical subjects

Matthijs L Noordzij

Publications and source records attributed to Matthijs L Noordzij.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Electrophysiological support for strategic processing of spatial sentences.

The aims of the present EEG study were to distinguish between the various representation options of spatial sentences and to gain insight into the moment at which differences in the processing of spatial sentences arise. To examine the possible existence of different strategies, we used sentence-sentence and sentence-picture verification trials in mixed blocks, whereby the probability of a specific second stimulus was fixed within a block but varied between blocks. Brain activation (slow wave, 550-1100 ms after stimulus onset) linked to parsing spatial sentences (and not nonspatial sentences) occurred at parieto-occipital regions associated with mental image processing, and only when participants were expecting to compare verbal information to a picture. Therefore, this study provides neuroimaging evidence that different representational formats of spatial sentences arise almost directly when people are reading a spatial sentence.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

The influence of visual experience on the ability to form spatial mental models based on route and survey descriptions.

The purpose of the present study is twofold: the first objective is to evaluate the importance of visual experience for the ability to form a spatial representation (spatial mental model) of fairly elaborate spatial descriptions. Secondly, we examine whether blind people exhibit the same preferences (i.e. level of performance on spatial tasks) as sighted people in processing the type of perspective that is employed in a spatial description. Early blind, late blind and sighted participants listened to a route and a survey description of two environments. Next, they had to execute a recognition/priming task, a bird flight distance comparison task, and a scale model task. Spatial priming and symbolic distance effects were found for all participants. These findings suggest that early and late blind people can form spatial mental models on the basis of route and survey descriptions. Interestingly, in contrast with sighted people, blind people performed better after listening to a route than a survey description, even when the spatial problems that has to be solved explicitly favor the survey description. It seems that people with active vision build up a spatial mental model more efficiently from a survey description, while people with only visual memories (late blind), similar to people with no visual memories (early blind), build up a spatial mental model more efficiently from a route description.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Strategic and automatic components in the processing of linguistic spatial relations.

The objective of the present study was to determine the extent to which strategies influence the representational format of a linguistic spatial relation. The propositional model assumes that a sentence describing a spatial relation is always represented as a set of propositions, whereas the strategic model claims that a spatial sentence can be represented either as a set of propositions or as a mental image, depending on the strategy (verbal or visual-spatial) an individual follows. Participants read a sentence (spatial or non-spatial) followed by a picture or sentence, which did or did not exemplify the information of the first sentence. In order to examine the involvement of strategic and automatic components the probability (20% or 80%) of the nature (sentence or picture) of the second stimulus was varied. Participants had slower verification RTs for unexpected stimuli than for expected stimuli, but this cost was significantly larger for an unexpected picture than an unexpected sentence. Furthermore, this asymmetric cost for the unexpected visual-spatial stimulus only occurred with spatial sentences and not with non-spatial sentences. Surprisingly, these data do not support a strictly propositional or a strategic model. Instead, we propose a third option: a dual representational model, in which people automatically represent the spatial sentence propositionally. In addition, depending on the context, a pictorial strategy is employed, which results in a supplementary visual-spatial representation.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Categorical and metric distance information in mental representations derived from route and survey descriptions.

Descriptions with a route perspective take the addressee into the environment and give information on the position of objects relative to the changing position of the addressee. In contrast, descriptions with a survey perspective adopt a bird's-eye view and describe objects with respect to one another. The objective of the present study was to determine whether the perspective of a spatial description influences the extent to which categorical and metric distance is represented. We studied the characteristics of the representations that were constructed from route or survey descriptions with a recognition/priming task and a bird-flight distance comparison task. Spatial priming and symbolic distance effects were present after participants had studied a verbal description. The spatial priming effect indicated that objects in the environment were spatially organized according to some kind of distance (i.e., categorical or metric) in the representation of the listener. Furthermore, this organization was not dependent on whether the objects in a given prime-target relation were explicitly mentioned in the same sentence, or instead had to be inferred from the text. The presence of symbolic distance effects indicated that larger differences in metric distance were easier to compare than smaller differences, which is an effect that is also expected if actual metric distances on a visual map have to be compared. Therefore, further evidence was provided that people are able to create map-like spatial representations of verbal descriptions. We replicated previous findings that route and survey descriptions result in representations from which categorical spatial information is equally available. This study is the first to find evidence that a mental representation, which contains some analog spatial detail (i.e., metric distance), can be constructed from a description with a route perspective. Importantly, it should be noted that a relative advantage for survey descriptions over route descriptions did exist, suggesting that survey descriptions lead to spatial representations with a more fine-grained localization of the objects than route descriptions.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Spatial tapping interferes with the processing of linguistic spatial relations.

Simple spatial relations may be represented either in a propositional format that is dependent on verbal rehearsal or in a picture-like format that is maintained by visual-spatial rehearsal. In sentence-picture and picture-picture verification tasks, we examined the effect of an articulatory suppression and a spatial tapping dual task on the encoding of simple spatial relations (e.g., triangle left of circle). Articulatory suppression did not interfere, while spatial tapping lowered performance in both tasks. Apparently, both linguistic and perceptual inputs of simple spatial relations engaged the visual-spatial working memory. In the sentence-picture verification experiments, spatial tapping only hampered performance of participants who were classified on the basis of their RT patterns as having used a visual-spatial strategy, while it had no effect for those who were classified as having applied a verbal strategy. Therefore, this study provides converging evidence, using a dual-task methodology, that both separate verbal and visual-spatial strategies exist for the processing of simple spatial sentences.

Analysis of Variance↗