Thompson Jacqueline M, Nuerk Hans-Christoph, Moeller Korbinian, Cohen Kadosh Roi
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OX1 3UD Oxford, UK.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2013 Oct;144(2):324-31. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2013.05.009. Epub 2013 Aug 7.
Mental rotation and number representation have both been studied widely, but although mental rotation has been linked to higher-level mathematical skills, to date it has not been shown whether mental rotation ability is linked to the most basic mental representation and processing of numbers. To investigate the possible connection between mental rotation abilities and numerical representation, 43 participants completed four tasks: 1) a standard pen-and-paper mental rotation task; 2) a multi-digit number magnitude comparison task assessing the compatibility effect, which indicates separate processing of decade and unit digits; 3) a number-line mapping task, which measures precision of number magnitude representation; and 4) a random number generation task, which yields measures both of executive control and of spatial number representations. Results show that mental rotation ability correlated significantly with both size of the compatibility effect and with number mapping accuracy, but not with any measures from the random number generation task. Together, these results suggest that higher mental rotation abilities are linked to more developed number representation, and also provide further evidence for the connection between spatial and numerical abilities.
心理旋转和数字表征都已得到广泛研究，然而，尽管心理旋转已与更高级的数学技能相关联，但迄今为止，尚未表明心理旋转能力是否与数字最基本的心理表征及处理相关。为了探究心理旋转能力与数字表征之间可能存在的联系，43名参与者完成了四项任务：1）一项标准的纸笔心理旋转任务；2）一项评估兼容性效应的多位数大小比较任务，该效应表明十位数和个位数是分开处理的；3）一项数字线映射任务，用于测量数字大小表征的精度；4）一项随机数生成任务，该任务可得出执行控制和空间数字表征的测量结果。结果显示，心理旋转能力与兼容性效应的大小以及数字映射准确性均显著相关，但与随机数生成任务的任何测量结果均无关。总之，这些结果表明，较高的心理旋转能力与更发达的数字表征相关联，同时也为空间能力和数字能力之间的联系提供了进一步的证据。
