Zhang Li, Chen Min, Lin Chongde, Szűcs Denes
Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, China; Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, China.
Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, China; Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, China.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2014 Sep;151:89-97. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.06.002. Epub 2014 Jun 21.
We examined the representation of two-digit decimals through studying distance and compatibility effects in magnitude comparison tasks in four experiments. Using number pairs with different leftmost digits, we found both the second digit distance effect and compatibility effect with two-digit integers but only the second digit distance effect with two-digit pure decimals. This suggests that both integers and pure decimals are processed in a compositional manner. In contrast, neither the second digit distance effect nor the compatibility effect was observed in two-digit mixed decimals, thereby showing no evidence for compositional processing of two-digit mixed decimals. However, when the relevance of the rightmost digit processing was increased by adding some decimals pairs with the same leftmost digits, both pure and mixed decimals produced the compatibility effect. Overall, results suggest that the processing of decimals is flexible and depends on the relevance of unique digit positions. This processing mode is different from integer analysis in that two-digit mixed decimals demonstrate parallel compositional processing only when the rightmost digit is relevant. Findings suggest that people probably do not represent decimals by simply ignoring the decimal point and converting them to natural numbers.
我们通过在四个实验中的大小比较任务中研究距离和兼容性效应，考察了两位小数的表征。使用具有不同最左数位的数字对，我们发现两位整数存在第二位数字距离效应和兼容性效应，但两位纯小数仅存在第二位数字距离效应。这表明整数和纯小数都是以组合方式进行处理的。相比之下，在两位混合小数中既未观察到第二位数字距离效应，也未观察到兼容性效应，因此没有证据表明两位混合小数存在组合处理。然而，当通过添加一些具有相同最左数位的小数对来增加最右数位处理的相关性时，纯小数和混合小数都会产生兼容性效应。总体而言，结果表明小数的处理是灵活的，并且取决于各个数位位置的相关性。这种处理模式与整数分析不同，因为两位混合小数仅在最右数位相关时才表现出并行组合处理。研究结果表明，人们可能不会简单地忽略小数点并将小数转换为自然数来表征小数。
