The Psychological Reality And Mapping Relationship Of Vertical Spatial Metaphor Of Adolescent Ability Concept

From a large number of linguistic expressions,we found that the concept of competence may be associated with vertical spatial orientation,so people tend to use some metaphors related to vertical spatial orientation to express the concept of competence,one of the abstract concepts.The existing related inquiry is used as the basis of this study,and then students from a middle school in Yibin are selected as the experimental participants of this study.In the research method,paradigms such as forced selection method and Stroop paradigm are used to investigate whether there is a vertical spatial metaphorical representation of ability concept,how its mapping direction is expressed,and what effect it will have on vertical distance judgment.By investigating these possibilities,we hope to provide some psychological basis for the study of vertical spatial metaphors of ability concepts.In Study 1,the experiment was conducted using the forced-choice method,in which participants were explicitly told that the task was to place the words in the questionnaire in a rectangle above or below the vertical space of the sketched cartoon character,as they wished,in order to examine whether subjects were more likely to place words with high ability attributes in the rectangle above the vertical space and words with low ability attributes in the rectangle below the vertical space.That is,it was examined whether the vertical space metaphor of the ability concept was psychologically realistic.Study 2 was divided into two experiments(Experiment 1 and Experiment 2)using the spatial Stroop paradigm.In Experiment 1 of Study 2,high or low ability words were first presented randomly in the middle of the computer screen and subjects were asked to judge the attributes of the presented words.Subsequently,subjects were asked to respond to the corresponding keystrokes for the letters that appeared above or below the screen.Experiment 1 will investigate whether subjects’ perceptions of vertical vertical spatial letters are affected under different nature of ability vocabulary initiation conditions by when they make judgments in response to letters in different spatial locations.In Experiment 2 of Study 2,a circle will be presented above or below the computer screen in front of the subject,and the subject will be asked to make a judgment about the position of the presented circle.The participants were then asked to judge the nature of the ability words presented in the center of the screen by randomly presenting high or low ability words in the center of the computer screen.The length of response time of the participants to make attribute judgments of the ability words was examined to see whether the activation conditions with different vertical spatial orientations could affect the subjects’ perception of the ability concept words.In this way,the direction of the mapping between the competence concept and the vertical spatial metaphor was tested to see whether it was unidirectional or whether there was bidirectionality.Study 3 was conducted by selecting the estimation method,firstly the subjects participating in the experiment were randomly divided into two groups,one group received only high ability vocabulary to start and the other group received low ability vocabulary,the experiment required the subjects to remember as much as possible the vocabulary presented on the computer screen.The subjects were then asked to complete the questions on a paper-and-pencil questionnaire.To test whether the subjects’ subsequent judgments of the high attributes of real-life objects under different nature of ability vocabulary priming were influenced by the priming conditions and thus led to biases.The following conclusions were drawn from the study:First,The vertical spatial metaphor of the concept of competence has a psychological reality.Specifically,people perceive high ability as being up and low ability as being down.Second,the vertical spatial metaphor of the ability concept has an effect on people’s estimation of spatial and object heights,resulting in a "cognitive bias effect",as subjects subjected to the high ability word priming group will estimate spatial and object heights more than those subjected to the low ability word priming group;subjects subjected to the low ability word priming group will underestimate spatial and object heights more than those subjected to the high ability word priming group.Third,the vertical spatial metaphor of competence concept has an impact on people’s estimation of space and object height,resulting in a "cognitive bias effect".Specifically,the subjects in the high-ability word priming group have a higher estimation of space and object height than those in the low-ability word priming group.Subjects in the low-ability word priming group underestimated spatial and object height more than those in the high-ability word priming group.In summary,the results of the above experiments show that the vertical spatial metaphor of the ability concept is psychologically realistic;the vertical spatial metaphor of the ability concept is mapped in a flexible and bidirectional manner;the vertical spatial metaphorical representation of the ability concept affects the estimation of spatial and object heights,showing the "cognitive bias effect" of the metaphorical representation of the ability concept.