The Automatic Mapping of Magnitude to Temporal Order Is Space-Dependent
Abstract
Abstract. Past research has shown that performance in ordinal magnitude tasks is enhanced when stimuli are presented in ascending order, suggesting that magnitude is mapped to temporal order, with small magnitude associated with early and large with late presentation. The present study addresses the automaticity of this effect and its limitations. We used the “same/different” task for numbers (Experiment 1) and physical sizes of shapes (Experiment 2) as well as identity of shapes (Experiment 3). The advantage for stimuli in ascending order was found for both numbers and physical sizes of shapes. However, it was limited to specific conditions – when magnitude processing was required for the task and when a “different” response was mapped to the right hand side. Thus, it seems that the automatic mapping of magnitude to temporal order is dependent on the mapping of magnitude to space.
References
1992). The ecology of automaticity: Towards establishing the conditions needed to produce automatic processing effect. The American Journal of Psychology, 105, 181–199. doi: 10.2307/1423027
(2013). Numerical and physical magnitudes are mapped into time. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 2309–2320. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2012.676656
(2015). In touch with numbers: Embodied and situated effects in number magnitude comparison. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 27, 478–489. doi: 10.1080/20445911.2014.1001760
(2014). Heterogeneous timescales are spatially represented. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 542. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00542
(2012). When time is space: Evidence for a mental time line. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 36, 2257–2273. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.08.007
(2009). The parietal cortex and the representation of time, space, number and other magnitudes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 1831–1840. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0028
(1999). The mathematical brain. London, UK: Papermac.
(2008). Time in the mind: Using space to think about time. Cognition, 106, 579–593. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.004
(2010). Space and time in the child’s mind: Evidence for a cross‐dimensional asymmetry. Cognitive Science, 34, 387–405. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01094.x
(2012). Increasing magnitude counts more: Asymmetrical processing of ordinality in 4-month-old infants. Cognition, 124, 183–193. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.05.004
(1969). Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning. Psychological Review, 76, 387–404. doi: 10.1037/h0027578
(2009). Integers do not automatically activate their quantity representation. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 16, 332–336. doi: 10.3758/PBR.16.2.332
(2009). Numerical representation in the parietal lobes: Abstract or not abstract? The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 313–373. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X09990938
(2014). Human infants’ preference for left-to-right oriented increasing numerical sequences. PLoS One, 9, e96412. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0096412
(2014). Representations of space, time, and number in neonates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 4809–4813. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1323628111
(1993). The mental representation of parity and number magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371–396. doi: 10.1037/0096-3445.122.3.371
(2010). Embodied numerosity: Implicit hand-based representations influence symbolic number processing across cultures. Cognition, 116, 251–266. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.05.007
(1996). The importance of magnitude information in numerical processing: Evidence from the SNARC effect. Mathematical Cognition, 2, 95–110. doi: 10.1080/135467996387552
(2001). Irrelevant digits affect feature-based attention depending on the overlap of neural circuits. Cognitive Brain Research, 12, 415–423. doi: 10.1016/S0926-6410(01)00078-7
(2009). The role of parity, physical size, and magnitude in numerical cognition: The SNARC effect revisited. Perception & Psychophysics, 71, 143–155.
(2009). Automatic numerical processing is based on an abstract representation. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 337–338. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x09990781
(2015). Exploring the boundaries of the number-time association. Experimental Psychology, 62, 198–205. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000285
(2015). Reaching toward an end: Numerical end and distance effects in motor movements. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 27, 490–498. doi: 10.1080/20445911.2014.950662
(2013). How are automatic processes elicited by intended actions? Frontiers in Psychology.
(2008). Across-notation automatic numerical processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 430–437. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.34.2.430
(2011). Across-notation automatic processing of two-digit numbers. Experimental Psychology, 58, 147–153. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000080
(2005). Direction effects in number word comparison: An event-related potential study. Neuroreport, 16, 1853–1856.
(1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York, NY: Basic Books.
(2000). Where mathematics comes from: How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being. New York, NY: Basic Books.
(2015). Embodiment of human number cognition. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 27, 381–387.
(1994). Using confidence intervals in within-subject designs. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 476–490.
(2008). “1–2–3”: Is there a temporal number line? Evidence from a serial comparison task. Experimental Psychology, 55, 143–150. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169.55.3.143
(2008). Perceiving numbers alters time perception. Neuroscience Letters, 438, 308–311. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2008.04.051
(2010). Thinking about the future moves attention to the right. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 17–24. doi: 10.1037/a0017176
(2006). Interaction between encoding and retrieval in the domain of sequence learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 118–130. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.32.1.118
(1975).
(Attention and cognitive control . In R. L. SolsoEd., The Loyola symposium. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.1981). A unified theory for matching-task phenomena. Psychological Review, 88, 291. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.88.4.291
(2006). Polarity correspondence: A general principle for performance of speeded binary classification tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 416–442. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.416
(2015). Keeping an eye on serial order: Ocular movements bind space and time. Cognition, 142, 291–298. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.05.022
(2002). E-Prime user’s guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.
(1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing. I. Detection search and attention. Psychological Review, 84, 127–190. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.84.1.1
(1997).
(Automatic but conscious: That is how we act most of the time . In R. S. WyerEd., Advances in social cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.2005).
(Automaticity in processing ordinal information . In J. I. D. CampbellEd., Handbook of mathematical cognition (pp. 55–67). New York, NY: Psychology Press.2008). An effect of spatial – temporal association of response codes: Understanding the cognitive representations of time. Cognition, 107, 501–527. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.10.011
(2015). Of magnitudes and metaphors: Explaining cognitive interactions between space, time, and number. Cortex, 64, 209–224. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.10.015
(2008). On the cognitive link between space and number: A meta-analysis of the SNARC effect. Psychology Science Quarterly, 50, 489–525.
(2007). Larger stimuli are judged to last longer. Journal of Vision, 7, 1–5. doi: 10.1167/7.10.2
(