Gurbuz Emre, Gokce Ahu
Department of Psychology, Saarland University1.
Adv Cogn Psychol. 2021 Jun 30;17(2):136-148. doi: 10.5709/acp-0324-4. eCollection 2021.
The present study was designed to investigate the representation of calorie levels in space. Previously an association between numerical magnitude and space has been established, namely, the Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect. The spatial-numerical association reveals representation of smaller and larger numbers by the left and right sides, respectively. In addition, previous studies showed that spatial arrangement of foods in space affects the food selection behavior. In three experiments, the presence of an association between calorie magnitude and space was tested to understand how it could potentially affect food selection behavior. Reaction times were recorded to investigate the speed of information processing. In Experiment 1, locations of low and high calorie food stimuli were (in)congruent in terms of the space-calorie association. In Experiment 2, endogenous spatial cues were used to bias attention to investigate if this bias would lead to formation of the space-calorie association. Finally, Experiment 3 investigated whether green and red colors evoke approach or avoidance behavior and prevent formation of the space-calorie association. In all experiments, results revealed lack of an association between space and calorie, that is, presenting low/high calorie items on the left/right hemispace, respectively, did not modulate the processing speed.
本研究旨在调查卡路里水平在空间中的表征。此前已经建立了数字大小与空间之间的关联，即反应码的空间数字关联（SNARC）效应。空间-数字关联分别通过左右两侧揭示较小和较大数字的表征。此外，先前的研究表明，空间中食物的空间排列会影响食物选择行为。在三个实验中，测试了卡路里大小与空间之间关联的存在情况，以了解其如何可能影响食物选择行为。记录反应时间以研究信息处理的速度。在实验1中，低卡路里和高卡路里食物刺激的位置在空间-卡路里关联方面是（不）一致的。在实验2中，使用内源性空间线索来偏向注意力，以研究这种偏向是否会导致空间-卡路里关联的形成。最后，实验3研究了绿色和红色是否会引发趋近或回避行为，并阻止空间-卡路里关联的形成。在所有实验中，结果均显示空间与卡路里之间缺乏关联，也就是说，分别在左/右半空间呈现低/高卡路里项目并未调节处理速度。
