Abstract
The spatial–numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect reflects the phenomenon that low digits are responded to faster with the left hand and high digits with the right. Recently, a particular variant of the SNARC effect known as the attentional SNARC (which reflects that attention can be shifted in a similar manner) has had notable replicability issues. However, a potentially useful method for measuring it was revealed by Casarotti et al. using a temporal order judgement (TOJ) task. Accordingly, the present study evaluated whether Casarotti et al.’s results were reproducible by presenting a low (1) or high (9) digit prior to a TOJ task where participants had to indicate which of two peripherally presented targets appeared first (Experiment 1) or second (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, it was revealed that the findings of Casarotti et al.’s were indeed observable upon replication. In Experiment 2, when attention and response dimensions were put in opposition, the SNARC effect corresponded to the side of response rather than attention. Taken together, the present study confirms the robustness of the attentional SNARC in TOJ tasks, but that it is not likely due to shifts in attention.
Highlights
There is no symbolic representation more important than numbers, and they have a profound impact on human processing
Participants with a mean percentage of left-first responses at the longest stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (i.e., ±300 ms) that fell outside two standard deviations of the mean of all participants at those SOAs were excluded from analysis, which led to the removal of three participants
Participants with a mean percentage of leftfirst responses at the longest SOAs (i.e., ± 300 ms) that fell outside two standard deviations of the mean of all participants at those SOAs were excluded from analysis, which led to the removal of four participants
Summary
There is no symbolic representation more important than numbers, and they have a profound impact on human processing This is exemplified by the spatial– numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect, which shows that digits influence our ability to respond (Dehaene et al, 1993; see Wood et al, 2008). This phenomenon was first revealed using a number parity judgement task where participants had to indicate whether a centrally displayed number was odd or even. It is proposed that the SNARC effect reflects that responding to numbers is facilitated when they are spatially congruent with their arrangement on a mental number line (Dehaene et al, 1993; Gevers et al, 2006; Zorzi et al, 2002; cf. Proctor & Cho, 2006)
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