Department of Biology, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1 UTSA Circle Dr., San Antonio, TX 78249, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 E Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA; Program in Neuroscience, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Aug;117:253-260. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.05.018. Epub 2018 May 22.
Arabic numerals have come to be used for many purposes beyond representing a particular quantity (e.g., as a label for an athlete on their jersey), but it remains to be determined how this type of meaningfulness is accessed and utilized by readers. Motivated by previous work showing that item-level ratings of personal familiarity can influence traditional indices of memory retrieval, we recorded ERPs while participants read double-digit Arabic numerals (e.g., "65"), presented in a list, and rated whether or not each was familiar/personally meaningful. All numbers repeated after a few intervening trials. The effect of number repetition on the N400 was not impacted by subjective judgments of familiarity, suggesting that all numbers (personally meaningful or not) make initial contact with semantics, facilitating semantic access on second exposure. However, consistent with findings from prior studies of memory for letter strings and visual patterns, there was a late positivity (LPC) on second presentation, selective to numbers rated as familiar. This is the first electrophysiological evidence that readers can use Arabic numerals to guide explicit retrieval of non-numerical information.
阿拉伯数字除了表示特定数量（例如，运动员球衣上的号码）外，还被广泛用于许多其他用途，但读者如何获取和利用这种意义仍有待确定。受先前研究的启发，该研究表明个人熟悉程度的项目级评分可以影响传统的记忆检索指标，我们在参与者阅读双位数阿拉伯数字（例如“65”）并对每个数字是否熟悉/具有个人意义进行评分时记录了 ERP。所有数字在几次间隔试验后重复出现。数字重复对 N400 的影响不受熟悉程度的主观判断的影响，这表明所有数字（无论是有意义还是没有意义）都与语义进行了初步接触，从而在第二次接触时促进了语义访问。然而，与先前关于字母串和视觉模式记忆的研究结果一致，在第二次呈现时出现了晚期正波（LPC），仅对被评为熟悉的数字有选择性。这是第一个表明读者可以使用阿拉伯数字来指导对非数字信息进行明确检索的电生理证据。
