Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2013 May;39(3):972-6. doi: 10.1037/a0029527. Epub 2012 Jul 30.
The representation of numbers is commonly viewed as an ordered continuum of magnitudes, referred to as the mental number line. Previous work has repeatedly shown that number representations evoked by a given task can be easily altered, yielding an ongoing discussion about the basic properties of the mental number line and how malleable they are. Here we studied whether the resolution of the mental number line is fixed or depends on the relative magnitudes that are being processed. In 2 experiments, participants compared the same number pairs under 2 conditions that differed in terms of the overall range of numbers present. We report a novel number range effect, such that comparisons of the same number pairs were responded to faster under the smaller versus larger number range. This finding is consistent with the idea that the resolution of the mental number line can be adjusted, as if a unit difference is perceived as larger in smaller ranges.
数字的表示通常被视为一个有序的数量连续体，称为心理数字线。先前的研究反复表明，给定任务引起的数字表示可以很容易地改变，这引发了关于心理数字线的基本属性以及它们的可塑性的持续讨论。在这里，我们研究了心理数字线的分辨率是固定的还是取决于正在处理的相对大小。在 2 项实验中，参与者在 2 种条件下比较相同的数字对，这 2 种条件在存在的整体数字范围上有所不同。我们报告了一种新的数字范围效应，即对于相同的数字对，在较小的数字范围下进行比较的反应速度快于在较大的数字范围下进行比较的反应速度。这一发现与这样一种观点一致，即心理数字线的分辨率可以进行调整，就好像在较小的范围内，一个单位的差异被感知为更大。
