Repeating Numbers Reduces Results: Violations of the Identity Axiom in Mental Arithmetic

Frontiers in Psychology

Martin H. Fischer¹ 

关键词: AHAB;    cognitive bias;    mental arithmetic;    numerical cognition;    operational momentum;    SNARC;    tie problems;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02453

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Even simple mental arithmetic is fraught with cognitive biases. For example, adding repeated numbers (so-called tie problems, e.g., 2 + 2) not only has a speed and accuracy advantage over adding different numbers (e.g., 1 + 3) but may also lead to under-representation of the result relative to a standard value (Charras et al., 2012, 2014). Does the tie advantage merely reflect easier encoding or retrieval compared to non-ties, or also a distorted result representation? To answer this question, 47 healthy adults performed two tasks, both of which indicated under-representation of tie results: In a result-to-position pointing task (Experiment 1) we measured the spatial mapping of numbers and found a left-bias for tie compared to non-tie problems. In a result-to-line-length production task (Experiment 2) we measured the underlying magnitude representation directly and obtained shorter lines for tie- compared to non-tie problems. These observations suggest that the processing benefit of tie problems comes at the cost of representational reduction of result meaning. This conclusion is discussed in the context of a recent model of arithmetic heuristics and biases.

【 授权许可】

CC BY