Knops André, Viarouge Arnaud, Dehaene Stanislas
INSERM, Unité 562, Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2009 May;71(4):803-21. doi: 10.3758/APP.71.4.803.
When we add or subtract, do the corresponding quantities "move" along a mental number line? Does this internal movement lead to spatial biases? A new method was designed to investigate the psychophysics of approximate arithmetic. Addition and subtraction problems were presented either with sets of dots or with Arabic numerals, and subjects selected, from among seven choices, the most plausible result. In two experiments, the subjects selected larger numbers for addition than for subtraction problems, as if moving too far along the number line. This operational momentum effect was present in both notations and increased with the size of the outcome. Furthermore, we observed a new effect of spatial-numerical congruence, related to but distinct from the spatial numerical association of response codes effect: During nonsymbolic addition, the subjects preferentially selected numbers at the upper right location, whereas during subtraction, they were biased toward the upper left location. These findings suggest that approximate mental arithmetic involves dynamic shifts on a spatially organized mental representation of numbers. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
当我们进行加法或减法运算时，相应的数量是否会在脑海中的数字线上“移动”？这种内在的移动会导致空间偏差吗？一种新方法被设计用来研究近似算术的心理物理学。加法和减法问题通过点阵或阿拉伯数字呈现，受试者从七个选项中选择最合理的结果。在两个实验中，受试者对加法问题选择的数字比对减法问题选择的数字更大，就好像在数字线上移动得太远了。这种操作动量效应在两种表示法中都存在，并且随着结果的大小而增加。此外，我们观察到一种新的空间-数字一致性效应，与反应编码效应的空间数字关联有关但又不同：在非符号加法运算中，受试者优先选择右上角位置的数字，而在减法运算中，他们则偏向于左上角位置。这些发现表明，近似心算涉及在数字的空间组织心理表征上的动态转换。本研究的补充材料可从app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental下载。
