1 Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
2 Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University-Bloomington.
Psychol Sci. 2017 May;28(5):599-608. doi: 10.1177/0956797617691548. Epub 2017 Mar 10.
Number lines, calendars, and measuring sticks all represent order along some dimension (e.g., magnitude) as position on a line. In high-literacy, industrialized societies, this principle of spatial organization- linear order-is a fixture of visual culture and everyday cognition. But what are the principle's origins, and how did it become such a fixture? Three studies investigated intuitions about linear order in the Yupno, members of a culture of Papua New Guinea that lacks conventional representations involving ordered lines, and in U.S. undergraduates. Presented with cards representing differing sizes and numerosities, both groups arranged them using linear order or sometimes spatial grouping, a competing principle. But whereas the U.S. participants produced ordered lines in all tasks, strongly favoring a left-to-right format, the Yupno produced them less consistently, and with variable orientations. Conventional linear representations are thus not necessary to spark the intuition of linear order-which may have other experiential sources-but they nonetheless regiment when and how the principle is used.
线条、日历和尺子都代表着某种维度（如大小）上的顺序，即在一条线上的位置。在高文化、工业化的社会中，这种空间组织原则——线性顺序——是视觉文化和日常认知的固定特征。但是，这个原则的起源是什么，它又是如何成为这样一个固定特征的呢？三项研究调查了来自巴布亚新几内亚的尤蓬人的线性顺序直觉，这是一个缺乏涉及有序线条的传统表现形式的文化的成员，以及美国本科生的线性顺序直觉。两组人都用线性顺序或有时用竞争原则——空间分组，来排列代表不同大小和数量的卡片。但是，美国参与者在所有任务中都产生了有序的线条，强烈倾向于从左到右的格式，而尤蓬人则不太一致地产生了这些线条，并且方向也不同。因此，传统的线性表示并不是激发线性顺序直觉所必需的——这种直觉可能有其他经验来源——但它们仍然规定了这个原则何时以及如何被使用。
