DOI:10.6129/CJP.202203_64(1).0003
中華心理學刊 民 111，64 卷，1 期，57-76
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2022, Vol.64, No.1, 57-76
Yu-Cin Jian（Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University）；Chao-Jung Wu（Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University）
Abstract
This study investigated how words and pictures convey spatial and kinematic representations in a reading condition and the relations between these two representations. Participants read a text (text group) describing the spatial configuration of a flushing cistern or viewed a diagram (diagram group) and completed a spatial test. Then, the two groups read the same text describing the kinematic machine operation and revised their first test answers. The participants’ eye movements were recorded while reading the kinematic information text. According to the results, the text group’s drawings showed the component relations more precisely, indicating that words helped readers capture detailed continuous relations, but the diagram group’s drawings better approximated the original picture, indicating the advantage of depicting overall relations. Analysis of the drawing tests indicated that kinematic representations help readers revise inner spatial representations mainly of continuous relations of components rather than part-whole relations. Moreover, eye movement data indicated that the groups differed in both global and local eye movements, and that different internal spatial representations of the spatial and diagram groups influenced the following kinematic information text reading. The text group had significantly shorter total fixation duration and second-pass reading time on the kinematic text, fewer complicated concept sentences (i.e., outlet processes), and fewer target words for components than the diagram group. In summary, this study confirmed that pictures and words served fundamentally different functions in conveying spatial configurations and clarified the interaction of spatial and kinematic representations from reading to mental model construction.
Keywords: eye movements, kinematic representation, reading, spatial configuration
