Abstract
The spatial-numerical associations of response codes (SNARC) effect reveals that individuals can represent numbers spatially. In this study, event-related potential (ERP) technology was used to probe the effect of verbal-spatial task instructions on spatial-numerical association coding by using digit parity and magnitude judgment tasks, with the numbers 1–9 (except 5) and Chinese word labels (“left” and “right”) as experimental materials. The behavioral results of Experiment 1 showed that the SNARC effect was mainly based on verbal-spatial coding and appeared when the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the presentation of the verbal labels and the target digit was 0 ms. ERP results did not reveal any significant SNARC-related effects in either the N1 or P3 components. The behavioral results of Experiment 2 again showed that the SNARC effect was dominated by verbal-spatial coding. ERP results showed that significant effects related to verbal-spatial coding were found in both the early positive deflection of the stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potential (S-LRP) and the latency of the response-locked LRP (R-LRP). Hence, in this study, the nature of the spatial coding of the digit magnitudes was influenced by the processing of the word labels and affected both the response selection and response preparation stages.
Highlights
Spatial-numerical associations are a hot topic in the field of numerical cognition
The results showed that the main effect of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was significant, F(3,57) = 46.61, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.71
The overall analysis of variance revealed a main effect of both SOA and word congruency along with an interaction between word congruency and physical congruency where the latter result signals the occurrence of spatial-numerical associations of response codes (SNARC) effects that relied on verbal-spatial coding
Summary
Spatial-numerical associations are a hot topic in the field of numerical cognition. As one of the most important pieces of evidence for such associations, the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) has been widely studied. The mental number line account assumes that numbers are represented in space in a left-right order from small to large. The polarity correspondence account for the SNARC effect holds that numbers are not arranged from left to right, but are related to space through other more conceptual means (Proctor and Cho, 2006). In the horizontal direction, left is considered the negative pole and right to be the positive pole On this view, the SNARC effect is not caused by a spatial representation of numbers from left to right, but is due to a conceptual correspondence between polarities. The mental number line account has been viewed as invoking a visuospatial coding of number magnitude, and the polarity correspondence and dual-route models as invoking a verbal-spatial coding (Gevers et al, 2010)
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