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

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 congrue...

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Main Authors:	Ren, Ping, Nicholls, Michael E. R., Ma, Yuan-ye, Chen, Lin
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2011
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154948/

id	pubmed-3154948
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-31549482011-08-18 Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response Ren, Ping Nicholls, Michael E. R. Ma, Yuan-ye Chen, Lin Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2011-08-11 /pmc/articles/PMC3154948/ /pubmed/21853151 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023553 Text en Ren et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Ren, Ping Nicholls, Michael E. R. Ma, Yuan-ye Chen, Lin
spellingShingle	Ren, Ping Nicholls, Michael E. R. Ma, Yuan-ye Chen, Lin Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response
author_facet	Ren, Ping Nicholls, Michael E. R. Ma, Yuan-ye Chen, Lin
author_sort	Ren, Ping
title	Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response
title_short	Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response
title_full	Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response
title_fullStr	Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response
title_full_unstemmed	Size Matters: Non-Numerical Magnitude Affects the Spatial Coding of Response
title_sort	size matters: non-numerical magnitude affects the spatial coding of response
description	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.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2011
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154948/
_version_	1611470581249605632

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

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