Zhang Yu, You Xuqun, Zhu Rongjuan
School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University and Shaanxi Provincial Key Laboratory of Behavior and Cognitive Neuroscience, Xi'an, China.
School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University and Shaanxi Provincial Key Laboratory of Behavior and Cognitive Neuroscience, Xi'an, China
Perception. 2016 Jul;45(7):787-804. doi: 10.1177/0301006616638782. Epub 2016 Mar 23.
Previous studies suggested that there are interconnections between two numeral modalities of symbolic notation and nonsymbolic notation (array of dots), differences and similarities of the processing, and representation of the two modalities have both been found in previous research. However, whether there are differences between the spatial representation and numeral-space mapping of the two numeral modalities of symbolic notation and nonsymbolic notation is still uninvestigated. The present study aims to examine whether there are differences between the spatial representation and numeral-space mapping of the two numeral modalities of symbolic notation and nonsymbolic notation; especially how zero, as both a symbolic magnitude numeral and a nonsymbolic conceptual numeral, mapping onto space; and if the mapping happens automatically at an early stage of the numeral information processing. Results of the two experiments demonstrate that the low-level processing of symbolic numerals including zero and nonsymbolic numerals except zero can mapping onto space, whereas the low-level processing of nonsymbolic zero as a semantic conceptual numeral cannot mapping onto space, which indicating the specialty of zero in the numeral domain. The present study indicates that the processing of non-semantic numerals can mapping onto space, whereas semantic conceptual numerals cannot mapping onto space.
以往的研究表明，符号记数法和非符号记数法（点阵数组）这两种数字形式之间存在相互联系，此前的研究已经发现了这两种形式在加工和表征方面的差异与相似之处。然而，符号记数法和非符号记数法这两种数字形式在空间表征和数字-空间映射方面是否存在差异仍未得到研究。本研究旨在考察符号记数法和非符号记数法这两种数字形式在空间表征和数字-空间映射方面是否存在差异；特别是零作为符号量级数字和非符号概念数字如何映射到空间；以及这种映射是否在数字信息处理的早期阶段自动发生。两个实验的结果表明，包括零在内的符号数字以及除零以外的非符号数字的低水平加工能够映射到空间，而作为语义概念数字的非符号零的低水平加工不能映射到空间，这表明了零在数字领域的特殊性。本研究表明，非语义数字的加工能够映射到空间，而语义概念数字不能映射到空间。
