Pinto Mario, Pellegrino Michele, Marson Fabio, Lasaponara Stefano, Cestari Vincenzo, D'Onofrio Marianna, Doricchi Fabrizio
Fondazione Santa Lucia IRCCS, Roma, Italy.
Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza', Roma, Italy; Fondazione Santa Lucia IRCCS, Roma, Italy.
Cortex. 2021 Jan;134:253-264. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.10.020. Epub 2020 Nov 18.
Humans are prone to mentally organise the ascending series of integers according to reading habits so that in western cultures small numbers are positioned to the left of larger ones on a mental number line. Despite 140 years since seminal observations by Sir Francis Galton (Galton, 1880a, b), the functional mechanisms that give rise to directional Space-Number Associations (SNAs) remain elusive. Here, we contrasted three different experimental conditions, each including a different version of a Go/No-Go task with intermixed numerical and arrow-targets (Shaki and Fischer, 2018; Pinto et al., 2019a). We show that directional SNAs are not "all or none" phenomena. We demonstrate that SNAs get progressively less noisy and more stable the more contrasting small/large magnitude-codes and contrasting left/right spatial-codes are explicitly and fully combined in the task set. The analyses of the time-course of space-number congruency effects showed that both the absence and presence of the SNA were independent of the speed of reaction times. In agreement with our original proposal (Aiello et al., 2012), these findings show that conceptualising the ascending series of integers in spatial terms depends on the use of spatial codes in the numerical task at hand rather than on the presence of an inherent spatial dimension in the semantic representation of numbers. This evidence suggests that directional SNAs, like the SNARC effect, are secondary to the primary transfer of spatial response codes to number stimuli, rather than deriving from a primary congruency or incongruence between independent spatial-response and spatial-number codes.
人类倾向于根据阅读习惯在心理上对整数的升序序列进行组织，以至于在西方文化中，在心理数字线上较小的数字位于较大数字的左侧。尽管自弗朗西斯·高尔顿爵士（Galton，1880a，b）做出开创性观察以来已有140年，但产生方向性空间 - 数字关联（SNA）的功能机制仍然难以捉摸。在这里，我们对比了三种不同的实验条件，每种条件都包括一个不同版本的Go/No - Go任务，其中数字和箭头目标混合出现（Shaki和Fischer，2018；Pinto等人，2019a）。我们表明，方向性SNA不是“全或无”现象。我们证明，在任务集中，小/大数量代码和左/右空间代码的对比越明确且充分地结合，SNA的噪声就会逐渐减少且变得更加稳定。对空间 - 数字一致性效应的时间进程分析表明，SNA的存在与否与反应时间的速度无关。与我们最初的提议一致（Aiello等人，2012），这些发现表明，从空间角度对整数升序序列进行概念化取决于手头数字任务中空间代码的使用，而不是数字语义表示中固有空间维度的存在。这一证据表明，方向性SNA与SNARC效应一样，是空间反应代码向数字刺激的主要转移的次要结果，而不是源于独立的空间反应和空间数字代码之间的主要一致性或不一致性。
