State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Cogn Process. 2021 Aug;22(3):475-486. doi: 10.1007/s10339-021-01019-4. Epub 2021 Mar 22.
People use mental number lines for both symbolic numerals and numerosity, but little is known about how these two mental number lines are related. The current study investigated the association in effect size, directionality of the mental number line, and development between symbolic and non-symbolic mental number lines to determine if they were related to or independent from each other. We collected data from numerosity- and digit-matching tasks that used the following numbers: 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, and 29. Tasks were performed by college undergraduates and the fifth-grade primary school students. The results showed that none of the effects for non-symbolic numbers was related to any of the effects for symbolic numbers, and vice versa, in both adults and children. Another notable finding was that the correlation between the SNARC (spatial-numerical association of response code) effect size and mathematical ability was negative in the adult group. These results are consistent with the dissociated processes hypothesis and suggest that mental number lines are notation-dependent. As shown by the SNARC effect, the mental number line might result in interference in the current task by an automatically activated spatial notation-dependent representation of numbers.
人们使用心理数字线来表示符号数字和数量，但对于这两种心理数字线之间的关系知之甚少。本研究调查了符号和非符号心理数字线之间在效应大小、心理数字线方向和发展上的关联，以确定它们是相互关联还是独立的。我们收集了来自数量和数字匹配任务的数据，使用的数字有：11、14、17、20、23、26 和 29。任务由大学生和五年级小学生完成。结果表明，在成人和儿童中，非符号数字的任何效应都与符号数字的任何效应无关，反之亦然。另一个值得注意的发现是，成人组中 SNARC（反应代码的空间-数字关联）效应大小与数学能力之间的相关性为负。这些结果与分离过程假说一致，表明心理数字线是依赖于符号的。如 SNARC 效应所示，心理数字线可能会通过自动激活的、依赖于空间符号的数字表示来干扰当前任务。
