Automaticity in processing spatial-numerical associations: Evidence from a perceptual orientation judgment task of Arabic digits in frames

Shuyuan Yu, Baichen Li, Meng Zhang, Tianwei Gong, Xiaomei Li, Zhaojun Li, Xuefei Gao, Shudong Zhang, Ting Jiang and Chuansheng Chen

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: Human adults are faster to respond to small/large numerals with their left/right hand when they judge the parity of numerals, which is known as the SNARC (spatial-numerical association of response codes) effect. It has been proposed that the size of the SNARC effect depends on response latencies. The current study introduced a perceptual orientation task, where participants were asked to judge the orientation of a digit or a frame surrounding the digit. The present study first confirmed the SNARC effect with native Chinese speakers (Experiment 1) using a parity task, and then examined whether the emergence and size of the SNARC effect depended on the response latencies (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) using a perceptual orientation judgment task. Our results suggested that (a) the automatic processing of response-related numerical-spatial information occurred with Chinese-speaking participants in the parity task; (b) the SNARC effect was also found when the task did not require semantic access; and (c) the size of the effect depended on the processing speed of the task-relevant dimension. Finally, we proposed an underlying mechanism to explain the SNARC effect in the perceptual orientation judgment task.

Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0229130

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229130

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