Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Cogn Emot. 2021 Mar;35(2):356-366. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2020.1846018. Epub 2020 Nov 11.
Previous research on the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) has demonstrated that SNARC-compatible digit arrangements are processed faster and more accurately than SNARC-incompatible arrangements. Concurrently, processing speed and accuracy have been conceptualised as indicating processing fluency - the ease of information processing - which has been shown to entail affective downstream consequences. Bridging these two research lines for the first time, we investigated whether digit arrangements that are compatible to this association are affectively preferred to association-incompatible digit arrangements. In a line of four experiments (total = 786), German participants were asked to indicate how much they like the overall appearance of two digits that appear at the right and at the left side of the screen. Results from three of the four experiments suggest that digit arrangements that are compatible with this spatial-numerical association indeed trigger positive feelings. These preference patterns were not moderated by the horizontal distance between the two digits, pointing towards a stable phenomenon that is insensitive to contextual spatial cues.
先前关于反应代码空间-数字关联（SNARC）的研究表明，与 SNARC 兼容的数字排列比与 SNARC 不兼容的数字排列处理得更快、更准确。同时，处理速度和准确性被概念化为表示处理流畅度——信息处理的容易程度——已经证明这会带来情感上的下游影响。为了首次将这两条研究线联系起来，我们调查了与这种关联兼容的数字排列是否在情感上优于与关联不兼容的数字排列。在四个实验系列（总计 786 个）中，德国参与者被要求表示他们对出现在屏幕左右两侧的两个数字的整体外观的喜爱程度。其中三个实验的结果表明，与这种空间-数字关联兼容的数字排列确实会引发积极的感觉。这些偏好模式不受两个数字之间的水平距离的调节，这表明这是一种稳定的现象，对上下文空间线索不敏感。
