Department of Psychology, Utah State University, 2810 Old Main Hill Logan, UT, USA.
Front Psychol. 2013 Aug 9;4:521. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00521. eCollection 2013.
Both time and numerosity can be represented continuously as analog properties whose discrimination conforms to Weber's Law, suggesting that the two properties may be represented similarly. Recent research suggests that the representation of time is influenced by the presence of emotional stimuli. If time and numerosity share a common cognitive representation, it follows that a similar relationship may exist between emotional stimuli and the representation of numerosity. Here, we provide evidence that emotional stimuli significantly affect humans' estimation of visual numerosity. During a numerical bisection task, enumeration of emotional stimuli (angry faces) was more accurate compared to enumeration of neutrally valenced stimuli (neutral faces), demonstrating that emotional stimuli affect humans' visual representation of numerosity as previously demonstrated for time. These results inform and broaden our understanding of the effect of negative emotional stimuli on psychophysical discriminations of quantity.
时间和数量都可以连续表示为模拟属性，其辨别符合韦伯定律，这表明这两个属性可能以相似的方式表示。最近的研究表明，时间的表示受情绪刺激的影响。如果时间和数量共享共同的认知表示，那么在情绪刺激和数量表示之间可能存在类似的关系。在这里，我们提供的证据表明，情绪刺激会显著影响人类对视觉数量的估计。在数字二分任务中，与中性效价刺激（中性面孔）相比，情绪刺激（愤怒面孔）的计数更准确，这表明情绪刺激会影响人类对数量的视觉表示，就像之前对时间所展示的那样。这些结果为我们提供了关于负性情绪刺激对数量知觉的心理物理辨别影响的信息，并拓宽了我们的理解。
