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Exploring the mental number line: evidence from a dual-task paradigm

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Abstract

In a parity-judgment task smaller numbers are responded to faster with the left-hand key and vice versa for larger numbers (SNARC effect; Dehaene et al., in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371–396, 1993). We used the psychological refractory period paradigm involving a parity-judgment task and tone-discrimination task to address the question at which stage this effect arises. When the parity-judgment task is performed second, then we found equal SNARC effects for the short and the long SOA. According to the central bottleneck model, this indicates that the effect arises during the response-selection or execution stage. In Experiment 2 the parity-judgment task was performed first. The pattern of results indicates that the SNARC effect originates during the perceptual encoding or response-selection. Together, our results suggest that the SNARC effect originates while the response is selected.

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Notes

  1. These words were used to ensure similar voice onset latencies for both responses

  2. We also conducted the experiment with six participants and manually recorded their vocal responses. The pattern of results (for both the tone-discrimination task and the parity-judgment task) obtained were the same as those reported below in which the vocal errors were included. Moreover, the vocal error rate was very low (1.35%). We conclude that the vocal error rates do not influence the main pattern of our findings

  3. We used a short SOA of 150 ms (in contrast to 50 ms in Experiment 1) as pre-experiments had indicated that a SOA of 50 ms made it very difficult for participants to discriminate which stimulus was presented first.

  4. The t value and SE refer to transformed error rates.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, P.O. Box 60 15 53, 14415, Potsdam-Golm, Germany

    Dana Müller & Wolf Schwarz

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  1. Dana Müller
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  2. Wolf Schwarz
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Correspondence to Dana Müller.

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Müller, D., Schwarz, W. Exploring the mental number line: evidence from a dual-task paradigm. Psychological Research 71, 598–613 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-006-0070-6

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