1. Mental movements without magnitude? A study of spatial biases in symbolic arithmetic
- Author
-
Martin H. Fischer and Michal Pinhas
- Subjects
Male ,Linguistics and Language ,Cognitive Neuroscience ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Spatial ability ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Operand ,Language and Linguistics ,Arabic numerals ,Number line ,Young Adult ,Mental Processes ,Perception ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Psychophysics ,Reaction Time ,Humans ,Arithmetic ,media_common ,Subtraction ,Space Perception ,Mental representation ,Visual Perception ,Female ,Psychology ,Mathematics ,Photic Stimulation ,Psychomotor Performance - Abstract
McCrink (McCrink, Dehaene, & Dehaene-Lambertz (2007). Moving along the number line: Operational momentum in nonsymbolic arithmetic. Perception and Psychophysics, 69(8), 1324-1333) documented an "Operational Momentum" (OM) effect - overestimation of addition and underestimation of subtraction outcomes in non-symbolic (dot pattern) arithmetic. We investigated whether OM also occurs with Arabic number symbols. Participants pointed to number locations (1-9) on a visually given number line after computing them from addition or subtraction problems. Pointing was biased leftward after subtracting and rightward after adding, especially when the second operand was zero. The findings generalize OM to the spatial domain and to symbolic number processing. Alternative interpretations of our results are discussed.
- Published
- 2008