Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America.
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2020 Feb 24;15(2):e0229130. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229130. eCollection 2020.
Human adults are faster to respond to small/large numerals with their left/right hand when they judge the parity of numerals, which is known as the SNARC (spatial-numerical association of response codes) effect. It has been proposed that the size of the SNARC effect depends on response latencies. The current study introduced a perceptual orientation task, where participants were asked to judge the orientation of a digit or a frame surrounding the digit. The present study first confirmed the SNARC effect with native Chinese speakers (Experiment 1) using a parity task, and then examined whether the emergence and size of the SNARC effect depended on the response latencies (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) using a perceptual orientation judgment task. Our results suggested that (a) the automatic processing of response-related numerical-spatial information occurred with Chinese-speaking participants in the parity task; (b) the SNARC effect was also found when the task did not require semantic access; and (c) the size of the effect depended on the processing speed of the task-relevant dimension. Finally, we proposed an underlying mechanism to explain the SNARC effect in the perceptual orientation judgment task.
当人们判断数字的奇偶性时，用左手/右手快速反应小/大数字，这种现象被称为 SNARC（空间数字反应编码）效应。据推测，SNARC 效应的大小取决于反应时。本研究引入了一种感知方向任务，要求参与者判断数字或数字周围框架的方向。本研究首先使用奇偶任务，用母语为汉语的人（实验 1）确认了 SNARC 效应，然后使用感知方向判断任务（实验 2、3 和 4）检验了 SNARC 效应的出现和大小是否取决于反应时。我们的结果表明：（a）在奇偶任务中，汉语参与者会自动处理与反应相关的数字-空间信息；（b）当任务不需要语义访问时，也会发现 SNARC 效应；（c）效应的大小取决于任务相关维度的处理速度。最后，我们提出了一种潜在的机制来解释感知方向判断任务中的 SNARC 效应。
