Abstract
The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)—the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers—has been used as evidence for embodied number representations and to support strong claims about the link between number and space (e.g., a mental number line). We attempted to replicate Experiment 2 of Fischer et al. by collecting data from 1,105 participants at 17 labs. Across all 1,105 participants and four interstimulus-interval conditions, the proportion of times the effect we observed was positive (i.e., directionally consistent with the original effect) was .50. Further, the effects we observed both within and across labs were minuscule and incompatible with those observed by Fischer et al. Given this, we conclude that we failed to replicate the effect reported by Fischer et al. In addition, our analysis of several participant-level moderators (finger-counting habits, reading and writing direction, handedness, and mathematics fluency and mathematics anxiety) revealed no substantial moderating effects. Our results indicate that the Att-SNARC effect cannot be used as evidence to support strong claims about the link between number and space.
Highlights
A foundational issue in cognitive science is the question of how people represent concepts
The Registered Replication Report (RRR) format pursued in the present study provides an ideal means of assessing the AttSNARC effect because in an RRR, results from all participating labs are included in the meta-analysis regardless of what those results are
In assessing replication, we distinguish between statistical hypotheses and scientific hypotheses and focus on that latter, in light of the scientific hypothesis advanced by Fischer et al Exclusions
Summary
A foundational issue in cognitive science is the question of how people represent concepts. Researchers have long reasoned that numbers might be represented in a spatially organized manner (Galton, 1880), for example, as a mental number line (e.g., Restle, 1970) Key support for this notion comes from a series of nine parity-judgment experiments conducted by Dehaene, Bossini, and Giraux (1993). Dehaene et al asked participants to judge whether a number was odd or even and reported that responses to large numbers were faster when participants pressed a right-hand key rather than a left-hand key, whereas the opposite was true for small numbers They labeled this number-magnitude-by-response-side interaction the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect. The results from the nine experiments reported in Dehaene et al were taken to support the idea of a mental number line and the association of numbers of increasing magnitude with the left-to-right axis of external space
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