Hartmann Matthias, Mast Fred W, Fischer Martin H
Division of Cognitive Sciences, University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany ; Department of Psychology, University of Bern Bern, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, University of Bern Bern, Switzerland.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jan 22;6:12. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00012. eCollection 2015.
While the influence of spatial-numerical associations in number categorization tasks has been well established, their role in mental arithmetic is less clear. It has been hypothesized that mental addition leads to rightward and upward shifts of spatial attention (along the "mental number line"), whereas subtraction leads to leftward and downward shifts. We addressed this hypothesis by analyzing spontaneous eye movements during mental arithmetic. Participants solved verbally presented arithmetic problems (e.g., 2 + 7, 8-3) aloud while looking at a blank screen. We found that eye movements reflected spatial biases in the ongoing mental operation: Gaze position shifted more upward when participants solved addition compared to subtraction problems, and the horizontal gaze position was partly determined by the magnitude of the operands. Interestingly, the difference between addition and subtraction trials was driven by the operator (plus vs. minus) but was not influenced by the computational process. Thus, our results do not support the idea of a mental movement toward the solution during arithmetic but indicate a semantic association between operation and space.
虽然空间数字关联在数字分类任务中的影响已得到充分证实，但其在心算中的作用尚不清楚。据推测，加法运算会导致空间注意力向右上方转移（沿“心理数字线”），而减法运算则会导致向左下方转移。我们通过分析心算过程中的自发眼动来验证这一假设。参与者在看着空白屏幕时大声解答口头呈现的算术题（如2 + 7、8 - 3）。我们发现，眼动反映了正在进行的心理运算中的空间偏差：与减法题相比，参与者在解答加法题时注视位置向上移动得更多，并且水平注视位置部分由操作数的大小决定。有趣的是，加法和减法试验之间的差异是由运算符（加与减）驱动的，但不受计算过程的影响。因此，我们的结果不支持心算过程中朝着答案进行心理移动的观点，而是表明运算与空间之间存在语义关联。
