Experimental Study On The Inhibition Of Individuals With Different Cognitive Styles In The Comprehension Of Sentences

In the process of the cognition, the inhibition is defined as the mechanism of preventing the irrelevant information from entering the working memory or eliminating the irrelevant information from the working memory. The function of the inhibition is access, deletion and restraining. Access function inhibits distracting information from entering working memory, is called the former role of inhibitory processes; the purpose of the deletion function is to clear the working memory of irrelevant information, the role of restraint in inhibition is to control the urge to react with the first and strongest response, they are called the last role of inhibitory processes. It remains controversial on the problem of inhibition mainly happened in the former or the last role of inhibitory processes. Sentence is the basic component of discourse, The research of the inhibition with ambiguity and external irrelevant information in sentence comprehension was significant. At present, researchers studying individual differences in inhibition mainly focused on different groups with different ages, different comprehension capacities and different working memory capacities,and they show different inhibition efficiencies. Cognitive style is an important perspective in researching individual differences. Many studies indicated that individuals with different cognitive styles have the difference in the inhibiting capacity. For solving the problem of the difference, the purpose here was to study the inhibition differences between FD and FI (field-dependence/independence) individuals in the comprehension of the sentence with ambiguity and external irrelevant information.In this study, two experiments were conducted, one of them is behavioral research, and another is eye tracking research. Experiment 1 studied differences between FD and FI individuals as they inhibited ambiguous words by setting different sentence kinds and time intervals, which adopted 2(cognitive style:FD, FI)×2(sentence kinds: experimental sentences,control sentences)×2(ISI:150ms,750ms)mixed factorial design. Cognitive styles were between-subject variable and sentence kinds and ISI were within-subject variables. Experiment 2 studied differences between FD and FI individuals as they inhibited external irrelevant information by setting different probe words and interferential materials. Reading with distracter paradigm was used when they read a sentence by eye-tracking technology. It adopted 2(cognitive style:FD, FI)×4 (distracter material:semantic interference, independent semantic interference, false words distracters and no distracters) mixed factorial design. Cognitive styles were between-subject variables and distracter material was within -subject variable. The results indicated:(1)Individuals with different cognitive styles were significantly different in inhibiting ambiguous words. The inhibition capacity of FI individuals was better than that of FD individual;(2)It takes or less than 750ms for FD individual to inhibit the ambiguous words with the shape;(3)Individuals with different cognitive styles were significantly different in inhibiting the external irrelevant information. The inhibition capacity of FI individuals was better than that of FD individuals. This difference occurs mainly in the last role of inhibitory processes;(4)The effects of distracter conditions affected the inhibitory processes. Compared to the true words distracting conditions, the false words distracting conditions were harder to inhibit;(5)The correlation of distracter conditions affected the inhibitory processes. Compared to the unrelated semantic distracters, the related semantic distracter words were harder to inhibit.