Newly-Acquired Quantity And Ordinal Information In Spatial-Numerical Congruency Effect

The Spatial-Numerical Congruency Effect is considered as an evidence of the association between numbers and space during perceptual processing,with faster responses to small numbers on the left side of the space and large numbers on the right side of the space.Interact with spatial information.Effects of spatial-numerical associations exist not only in a wide range of motor responses,such as hands responses,saccades,fingers responses,but also at the level of stimulus perception.The meaning of numbers is connected to a particular quantity,such as the cardinality of some apples,each number stands in a particular relation with all other numbers clearly defined by its unique position within the number order which named as ordinal information.Differently from numbers,musical note values are represented as a decreasing left-to-right progression.In this study,five experiments were conducted to explore the roles of quantity and order in the spatial-numerical congruency effect.In experiment 1,an Arabic numeral presented on the left or right side of screen,subjects verbally reported the quantity of the Arabic numerals.It turns out that there is a significant interaction between the number and space,recreating the spatial-numerical congruency effect.In experiment 2,the newly acquired random dot patterns are used,the stimulus only contented with the quantity information.Participants verbally reported the size of the dot patterns on the left or right side of screen.There was no significant spatial-numerical consistency effect.In experiment 3,the stimulus only contained ordinal information.Participants verbally reported the order of stimulus,no significant ordinal spatial consistency effect was found.The reason is that the spatial coding of the order information requires the activation of the semantic system.In experiment 4,we used a dual-task paradigm.The stimulus contained with quantity and ordinal information(similar to Arabic numerals).The participants judged the size or the order of stimulus by the introductions,we failed to find the interaction between the two kinds of information with spatial information.In experiment 5,the quantity and ordinal information of stimulus was inverse association(similar to note values),the results were the same as Experiment 4.Summarizing the five experiments,the interaction between numbers and space in the perceptual processing is verified,and the spatial coding of ordinal information requires the activation of the semantic system in working memory.The newly acquired random dots patterns cannot be equivalent to numbers or note values(semantic symbols).