State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, People's Republic of China.
PLoS One. 2011;6(8):e23553. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023553. Epub 2011 Aug 11.
It is known that small and large numbers facilitate left/right respectively (the SNARC effect). Recently, it has been proposed that numerical magnitude is just one example of a range of quantities, which have a common cognitive/neural representation. To investigate this proposition, response congruency effects were explored for stimuli which differed according to their: (a) numerical size, (b) physical size, (c) luminance, (d) conceptual size and (e) auditory intensity. In a series of experiments, groups of undergraduate participants made two-alternative forced choice discriminations with their left or right hands. There were clear interactions between magnitude and responding hand whereby right hand responses were faster for stimuli with (a) large numbers, (b) large physical size, (c) low luminance, and (d) a reference to large objects. There was no congruency effect for the auditory stimuli. The data demonstrate that the response congruency effect observed for numbers also occurs for a variety of other non-numerical visual quantities. These results support models of general magnitude representation and suggest that the association between magnitude and the left/right sides of space may not be related to culture and/or directional reading habits.
人们知道，小数字和大数字分别有助于左/右手（SNARC 效应）。最近，有人提出，数值大小只是一系列数量的一个例子，这些数量具有共同的认知/神经表示。为了研究这一命题，我们探讨了刺激的反应一致性效应，这些刺激根据它们的：（a）数值大小，（b）物理大小，（c）亮度，（d）概念大小和（e）听觉强度而有所不同。在一系列实验中，一组组本科生用左手或右手进行了两种选择的强制选择辨别。大小和反应手之间存在明显的相互作用，即对于（a）大数字、（b）大物理尺寸、（c）低亮度和（d）大物体的参考，右手反应更快。对于听觉刺激，没有一致性效应。这些数据表明，对于数字观察到的反应一致性效应也发生在各种其他非数字视觉量上。这些结果支持一般大小表示模型，并表明大小与空间的左/右侧之间的关联可能与文化和/或定向阅读习惯无关。
