Castronovo Julie, Seron Xavier
Unite de Neurosciences Cognitives, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. j.castronovo@@leeds.ac.uk
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2007 Oct;33(5):1089-106. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.33.5.1089.
Vision was for a long time considered to be essential in the elaboration of the semantic numerical representation. However, early visual deprivation does not seem to preclude the development of a spatial continuum oriented from left to right to represent numbers (J. Castronovo & X. Seron, 2007; D. Szücs & V. Csépe, 2005). The authors investigated the impact of blindness and its following experience on a 3rd property of the mental number line: its obedience to Weber's law. A group of blind subjects and a group of sighted subjects were submitted to 2 numerical estimation tasks: (a) a keypress estimation task and (b) an auditory events estimation task. Blind and sighted subjects' performance obeyed Weber's law. However, blind subjects demonstrated better numerical estimation abilities than did sighted subjects, especially in contexts involving proprioception, indicating the existence of better mapping abilities between the symbolic representations of numbers and their corresponding magnitude representations, obeying Weber's law (e.g., J. S. Lipton & E. Spelke, 2005). These findings suggest that blindness and its following experience with numbers might result in better accuracy in numerical processing.
长期以来，视觉被认为在语义数字表征的形成过程中至关重要。然而，早期视觉剥夺似乎并不妨碍从左到右定向的空间连续体的发展，以用来表征数字（J. 卡斯特罗诺沃和X. 塞隆，2007年；D. 舒克斯和V. 切佩，2005年）。作者们研究了失明及其后续经历对心理数字线的第三个属性的影响：其对韦伯定律的遵循情况。一组盲人受试者和一组有视力的受试者接受了两项数字估计任务：（a）按键估计任务和（b）听觉事件估计任务。盲人和有视力的受试者的表现都遵循韦伯定律。然而，盲人受试者表现出比有视力的受试者更好的数字估计能力，尤其是在涉及本体感觉的情境中，这表明在数字的符号表征与其相应的数量表征之间存在更好的映射能力，遵循韦伯定律（例如，J. S. 利普顿和E. 斯佩尔克，2005年）。这些发现表明，失明及其后续与数字的接触可能会提高数字处理的准确性。
