The Interaction Between Temporal and Spatial Information in the Updating of Situation Model

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Situation models refer to discourse representations that capture aspects of a micro-world created by the reader. They include five dimensions: temporality, spatiality, causality, intentionality, and protagonist. Researchers have tended to focus on the construction of situation models from a single dimension perspective. In earlier studies, researchers explored the effects of temporal or spatial information, but more recently some have redirected their attention to the interaction of temporal or spatial information with the other three dimensions of situational models. However, no experimental studies have examined the relationship between temporal and spatial information. The primary purpose of this study was to explore the interaction between temporal and spatial information. Time is linear and continuous, but space is three-dimensional and discontinuous. There were three possible relations between time and space, which were independent, inhibitory and facilitating. So, the secondary purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between temporal and spatial information in situation model processing. Ninety-seven college students participated in this study: 36 in Experiment 1, 37 in Experiment 2, and 24 in Experiment 3. In Experiment 1 we explored the relationship between temporal and spatial information when time and space dimension shifted simultaneously. In Experiment 2 we examined the interaction between timeand space when the temporal dimension and spatial dimension shifted serially. In Experiment 3, which included bilingual student proficient in English and Chinese, we used English texts to test the possible interference caused by the habits of language expression to further explore the interaction of temporal and spatial information when the time and space dimension shifted serially. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that reading time was shorter when temporal and spatial information shifted simultaneously than when either the temporal or spatial dimension shifted. This finding suggested a facilitating effect between temporal and spatial information. Results of Experiment 2 showed that when temporal and spatial information shifted and the temporal dimension shifted first, reading time was shorter than when only one dimension shifted. This finding suggested that the shift in the temporal dimension had a facilitating effect on the shift in spatial information. Results of Experiment 3 were similar to those of Experiment 1, but also showed that the time dimension had a more significant facilitating effect on the processing of the spatial information shift. In sum, we found that when temporal and spatial information shifted simultaneously there was a facilitating effect between the two dimensional shifts, but that the facilitating effect of the temporal dimension on the spatial dimension was stronger than that of the spatial dimension on the temporal dimension. We also found that when temporal and spatial information shifted serially, only temporal information had a significant facilitating effect on the space dimension. However, this effect was found only with bilingual students using Chinese materials. When bilingual students read English materials, there was a mutual facilitating effect between the two dimensional shifts, but the temporal dimension had a more facilitating effect on the spatial dimension. Together, the results showed that the updating of temporal and spatial information in situation models is bound together. The results are discussed in terms of binding-expectancy hypothesis.