Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response

Abstract

It is known that small and large numbers facilitate left/right respectively (the SNARC effect). Recently, it has been proposed that numerical magnitude is just one example of a range of quantities, which have a common cognitive/neural representation. To investigate this proposition, response congruency effects were explored for stimuli which differed according to their: (a) numerical size, (b) physical size, (c) luminance, (d) conceptual size and (e) auditory intensity. In a series of experiments, groups of undergraduate participants made two-alternative forced choice discriminations with their left or right hands. There were clear interactions between magnitude and responding hand whereby right hand responses were faster for stimuli with (a) large numbers, (b) large physical size, (c) low luminance, and (d) a reference to large objects. There was no congruency effect for the auditory stimuli. The data demonstrate that the response congruency effect observed for numbers also occurs for a variety of other non-numerical visual quantities. These results support models of general magnitude representation and suggest that the association between magnitude and the left/right sides of space may not be related to culture and/or directional reading habits.

A continuous mapping between space and valence with left- and right-handers

“…Recently, a growing body of results has supported the idea that the left-right axis is a relevant spatial reference in order to metaphorically understand continuous abstract concepts. Indeed, mapping between such an axis and concepts such as numbers, time, and even politics is now strongly supported (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008;Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993;Oppenheimer & Trail, 2010;Ren, Nicholls, Ma, & Chen, 2011; for recent reviews, see Bonn & Cantlon, 2012;Dijkstra, Eerland, Zijlmans, & Post, 2014;Winter et al, 2015). Together with our present results regarding the concept of valence, we assume the possibility that humans could have a kind of general tendency to represent continuous abstract concepts via the metaphor of a left-right continuum.…”

Separate mechanisms for magnitude and order processing in the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect: The strange case of musical note values.

“…The results of Experiment 2 and 3 suggest that when note values are not directly assessed they are processed similarly to other non-symbolic quantities, such as luminance and size (Fumarola et al, 2014;Ren et al 2011). In particular, this evidence is in line with previous findings regarding the STEARC effect, i.e.…”

SNARC for numerosities is modulated by comparative instruction (and resembles some non-numerical effects)

“…On the one hand, a lot of evidence has accumulated to suggest that a spatial component can be associated with most kinds of magnitude information (Bulf et al 2014;Dehaene et al 1993;Ren et al 2011;Yates et al 2013), including numerosity (Mitchell et al 2012;Yates et al 2013). However, whereas previous studies demonstrated cultureconsistent SNARC for numerosities using the classical Note that Hebrew-speaking participants made just few errors, which might have reduced systematic variance in their responses 2 We interpret the difference in SNARC patterns between two language groups, revealed in error analysis, with caution.…”

“…The subsequent studies on spatial coding have been extended to other representational domains, including various types of non-numerical information. Among these are temporal duration (Ishihara et al 2008;Vallesi et al 2008), sound pitch (Rusconi et al 2006), luminance (Fumarola et al 2014), physical and conceptual sizes (Ren et al 2011), political orientation (van Elk et al 2010, financial gain or loss (Vicario and Rumiati 2014), and nonquantitative ordinal information such as days of the week (Gevers et al 2004), months of the year (Gevers et al 2003), or newly learned sequences of words (Previtali et al 2010;van Dijck and Fias 2011). A cultural influence on some of these effects has also been demonstrated (Vallesi et al 2014).…”