van Dijck Jean-Philippe, Gevers Wim, Lafosse Christophe, Fias Wim
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2012 Jan 10;5:182. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00182. eCollection 2011.
It is generally accepted that the mental representation of numerical magnitude consists of a spatial "mental number line" (MNL) with smaller quantities on the left and larger quantities on the right. However, the amount of dissociations between tasks that were believed to tap onto this representational medium is accumulating, questioning the universality of this model. The aim of the present study was to unravel the functional relationship between the different tasks and effects that are typically used as evidence for the MNL. For this purpose, a group of right brain damaged patients (with and without neglect) and healthy controls were subjected to physical line bisection, number interval bisection, parity judgment, and magnitude comparison. Using principal component analysis, different orthogonal components were extracted. We discuss how this component structure captures the dissociations reported in the literature and how it can be considered as a first step toward a new unitary framework for understanding the relation between numbers and space.
人们普遍认为，数字大小的心理表征由一条空间“心理数字线”（MNL）构成，左边是较小的数量，右边是较大的数量。然而，据信利用这种表征媒介的任务之间的分离现象正在不断积累，这对该模型的普遍性提出了质疑。本研究的目的是揭示不同任务与通常被用作MNL证据的效应之间的功能关系。为此，一组右脑损伤患者（有忽视症状和无忽视症状）和健康对照组接受了物理线段平分、数字区间平分、奇偶判断和大小比较测试。通过主成分分析，提取了不同的正交成分。我们讨论了这种成分结构如何捕捉文献中报道的分离现象，以及它如何可以被视为朝着理解数字与空间关系的新统一框架迈出的第一步。
