Does Number Perception Cause Automatic Shifts of Spatial Attention? A Study of the Att-SNARC Effect in Numbers and Chinese Months

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Dexian He¹  Xianyou He¹  Tingting Zhao⁴  Jing Wang⁵  Longzhao Li⁶  Max Louwerse⁷ 

[1] School of Psychology, South China Normal University;Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University;Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University;School of Health Management, Guangzhou Medical University;Human Resource Department, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies;Human Resource Department, Architectural Design and Research Institute of Guangdong Province;Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University

关键词: attention;    SNARC effect;    mental number line;    number processing;    ordinal sequences;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00680

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The Attentional Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes (Att-SNARC) effect has shown that number perception induces shifts in spatial attention ( Fischer et al., 2003 ; Dodd et al., 2008 ). However, many replications were attempted and they often failed. In the present study, we investigated whether the Att-SNARC effect can be found for numbers in different notations: months in Arabic form, Simplified Chinese form, Traditional Chinese form (includes numerical ordinal information) and in Chinese non-numerical form (an ordinal sequence). By varying the cognitive task, we also examined whether the effect is a consequence of automatic perceptual processing. In Experiment 1, an Att-SNARC effect was observed for numbers regardless of notation. In Experiment 2 (order-irrelevant task) and Experiment 3 (order-relevant task), the effect was also found consistently for months in Arabic form, Simplified Chinese form, and Traditional Chinese form. This effect was not observed for months in Chinese non-numerical form in Experiment 3. These results show that number and numerical sequence perception automatically causes a spatial shift of attention. Our study provides positive evidence for the Att-SNARC effect and indicates that the effect can generalize to other numerical ordinal sequences that contain numeric information.

【 授权许可】

CC BY