Knops André, Dehaene Stanislas, Berteletti Ilaria, Zorzi Marco
a Department of Psychology , Humboldt University at Berlin , Berlin , Germany.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2014;67(8):1541-56. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2014.890234. Epub 2014 Mar 11.
The operational momentum (OM) effect describes a cognitive bias whereby we overestimate the results of mental addition problems while underestimating for subtraction. To test whether the OM emerges from psychophysical characteristics of the mental magnitude representation we measured two basic parameters (Weber fraction and numerical estimation accuracy) characterizing the mental magnitude representation and participants' performance in cross-notational addition and subtraction problems. Although participants were able to solve the cross-notational problems, they consistently chose relatively larger results in addition problems than in subtraction problems, thus replicating and extending previous results. Combining the above measures in a psychophysical model allowed us to partially predict the chosen results. Most crucially, however, we were not able to fully model the OM bias on the basis of these psychophysical parameters. Our results speak against the idea that the OM is due to basic characteristics of the mental magnitude representation. In turn, this might be interpreted as evidence for the assumption that the OM effect is better explained by attentional shifts along the mental magnitude representation during mental calculation.
操作动量（OM）效应描述了一种认知偏差，即我们在高估加法心算结果的同时低估减法心算结果。为了测试OM效应是否源于心理量表征的心理物理学特征，我们测量了两个表征心理量的基本参数（韦伯分数和数值估计准确性）以及参与者在跨符号加减法问题中的表现。尽管参与者能够解决跨符号问题，但他们在加法问题中始终比减法问题选择相对更大的结果，从而重复并扩展了先前的结果。将上述测量结果纳入心理物理学模型使我们能够部分预测所选结果。然而，最关键的是，我们无法基于这些心理物理学参数对OM偏差进行完整建模。我们的结果反驳了OM效应源于心理量表征基本特征的观点。反过来，这可能被解释为有证据支持这样一种假设，即OM效应可以通过心算过程中沿心理量表征的注意力转移得到更好的解释。
