Automaticity of Access to Numerical Magnitude and Its Spatial Associations: The Role of Task and Number Representation

Autor/inn/en	Cleland, Alexandra A.; Bull, Rebecca
Titel	Automaticity of Access to Numerical Magnitude and Its Spatial Associations: The Role of Task and Number Representation
Quelle	In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45 (2019) 2, S.333-348 (16 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0278-7393
DOI	10.1037/xlm0000590
Schlagwörter	Undergraduate Students; Number Concepts; Number Systems; Spatial Ability; Stimuli; Experiments + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Number concept; Zahlbegriff; Number system; Zahlensystem; Räumliches Vorstellungsvermögen; Anreizsystem; Erprobung
Abstract	Generally, people respond faster to small numbers with left-sided responses and large numbers with right-sided responses, a pattern known as the SNARC (spatial numerical association of response codes) effect. The SNARC effect is interpreted as evidence for amodal automatic access of magnitude and its spatial associations, because it occurs in settings where number is task-irrelevant and for different number formats. We report five studies designed to establish the degree to which activation of magnitude and its spatial associations is truly automatic and amodal. Based on the notion of autonomous automaticity, we hypothesized that the mere presence of a number form (to which participants made a color decision) would be sufficient to elicit the SNARC effect. However, we found no evidence of a SNARC effect for simple color decisions to Arabic digits (Experiment 1). There was a SNARC effect for color decision to digits when participants recognized the stimulus as a digit before responding (Experiment 2), participants viewed the digit for sufficient time before color onset (Experiments 3 and 5), or there was temporal uncertainty regarding color onset (Experiment 3). There was no SNARC effect for color decision to arrays of circles (Experiment 4), regardless of viewing time or temporal uncertainty. Overall, our results suggest that, while access to magnitude and its spatial associations is not automatic in an "all-or-none" sense, it is certainly at the strong end of automaticity, and that this automatic activation is modality dependent. Our findings are most supportive of conceptual coding accounts of the SNARC effect. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01