Given a maze (e.g., in a book of puzzles), you might solve it by drawing out paths with your pencil. But even without a pencil, you might naturally find yourself mentally tracing along various paths. This "mental path tracing" may intuitively seem to depend on your (overt, conscious, voluntary) goal of wanting to get out of the maze, but might it also occur spontaneously-as a result of simply seeing the maze, via a kind of dynamic visual routine? Here, observers simply had to compare the visual properties of two probes presented in a maze. The maze itself was entirely task irrelevant, but we predicted that simply seeing the maze's visual structure would "afford" incidental mental path tracing (à la Gibson). Across four experiments, observers were slower to compare probes that were further from each other along the paths, even when controlling for lower level properties (such as the probes' brute linear separation, ignoring the maze "walls"). These results also generalized beyond mazes to other unfamiliar displays with task-irrelevant circular obstacles. This novel combination of two prominent themes from our field-affordances and visual routines-suggests that at least some visual routines may not require voluntary goals; instead, they may operate in an automatic (incidental, stimulus-driven) fashion, as a part of visual processing itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

与任务无关的迷宫中的自发路径追踪：空间可供性触发动态视觉例程。


给定一个迷宫（例如，在一本谜题书中），您可以通过用铅笔画出路径来解决它。但即使没有铅笔，你也可能会自然地发现自己在脑海中沿着不同的路径描绘。这种“心理路径追踪”可能直观上取决于你想要走出迷宫的（明显的、有意识的、自愿的）目标，但它也可能自发地发生——作为简单地看到迷宫的结果，通过一种动态视觉常规？在这里，观察者只需比较迷宫中两个探针的视觉特性。迷宫本身与任务完全无关，但我们预测，仅仅看到迷宫的视觉结构就可以“承担”偶然的心理路径追踪（à la Gibson）。在四个实验中，观察者比较沿路径彼此距离较远的探针的速度较慢，即使在控制较低级别的属性（例如探针的粗暴线性分离，忽略迷宫“墙”）时也是如此。这些结果还推广到迷宫以外的其他不熟悉的显示器，这些显示器具有与任务无关的圆形障碍物。这种来自我们的现场可供性和视觉例程的两个突出主题的新颖组合表明，至少某些视觉例程可能不需要自愿目标；相反，它们可能以自动（偶然的、刺激驱动的）方式运作，作为视觉处理本身的一部分。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。