1. Consumption of Cognitive Resources in Verbal-humor Processing: Evidence from a Dual-task Paradigm
- Author
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Xueyan, Li, Han, Wang, Hanning, Guo, Lina, Sun, Beixian, Gu, Yanhui, Cui, Huili, Wang, Xueyan, Li, Han, Wang, Hanning, Guo, Lina, Sun, Beixian, Gu, Yanhui, Cui, and Huili, Wang
- Abstract
Studies have shown that verbal humor takes longer processing time than non-humorous materials. Since processing time is often used to assess cognitive resource consumption, many researchers believe that verbal humor processing requires more cognitive resources than non-humor processing. However, some studies yielded the opposite result, so it is still controversial whether verbal humor processing consumes more cognitive resources than non-humor processing. Cognitive resources from a limited pool can be automatically allocated to meet the task demands in light of the difficulty of the tasks and the level of performance. Thus, in the current behavioral study, we employed a dual-task paradigm to access the cognitive resource consumption of verbal-humor processing by examining the performance of a subsequent task and further to identify which element, cognitive element or affective element, contributes more to the resource consumption. The current study utilized a 3×2 within-subject design with sentence type (humorous, positive, neutral) and arithmetical operation (simple, difficult) as the independent variables, and Reaction Times (RTs) and accuracy of the arithmetical operation as dependent variables. By collecting and analyzing the data of 82 participants, we found that RTs of arithmetical operations after verbal-humor processing were significantly longer than those after positive and neutral sentence processing, and there was an interaction effect between sentence type and task difficulty, which indicated that verbal-humor processing consumed more cognitive resources than non-humor processing. Whereas, the RTs after processing positive sentences were significantly shorter than those after neutral sentences, suggesting that resource consumption was not attributed to positive emotion arousal. In conclusion, the current study confirms that verbal-humor processing did consume more cognitive resources than non-humorous materials, and although both the cognitive element a
- Published
- 2023