Abstract
The magnitude associated with a stimulus can be spatially connoted, with relatively smaller and larger magnitudes that would be represented on the left and on the right side of space, respectively. According to recent evidence, this space–magnitude association could reflect specific brain asymmetries. In this study, we explored whether such an association can also emerge for face age, assuming that responders should represent relatively younger and older adult faces on the left and on the right, respectively. A sample of young adults performed a speeded binary classification task aimed at categorising the age of a centrally placed adult face stimulus as either younger or older than the age of a reference face. A left-side and a right-side response key were used to collect manual responses. Overall, older faces were categorised faster than younger faces, and response latencies decreased with the absolute difference between the age of the target stimulus and the age of the reference, in line with a distance effect. However, no evidence of a left-to-right spatial representation of face age emerged. Taken together, these results suggest that face age is mapped onto space differently from other magnitudes.
Highlights
A prominent phenomenon emerging from the scientific literature on human cognition is that magnitudes of different nature can be spatially represented
We developed a SNARC-like task related to face age, trying to remain as adherent as possible to standard approaches employed to reveal the classic SNARC effect with number stimuli [1]
It is interesting to note that supporting evidence for a left-to-right spatial representation of face age has been found in a study [37] in which participants saw two photos of Woody Allen presented in succession, and they were asked to decide if the second photo depicted him in either an earlier or later time point of his life with respect to the first photo
Summary
A prominent phenomenon emerging from the scientific literature on human cognition is that magnitudes of different nature can be spatially represented In this regard, the most classic example involves the numerical domain, with relatively smaller and larger numbers that are typically associated with the left and the right part of space, respectively. Faster responses are generally reported when small and large numbers are responded to with the left- and right-side response keys, compared to when the opposite mapping (i.e., small-right/large-left) is used This phenomenon is referred to as the spatial–numerical association of response codes, or SNARC effect [1], and it can emerge even when the number magnitude is task-irrelevant, that is, when digits are classified as either odd or even rather than as smaller or larger than a reference, indicating that number magnitude can be extracted automatically [1]. Longer distances on the MNL would be associated with an increased discriminability of number pairs, which would explain the distance effect
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