Abstract
Recent evidence has shown that uninformative numbers can trigger attention shifts congruent with the spatial representation of number magnitude (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003). In the present study, three spatial-cuing experiments whose aim was to qualify the automaticity of this numbermediated orienting are described. Experiment 1 replicated the phenomenon, showing that uninformative numbers can evoke orienting in a simple detection task. In Experiment 2, target location was random, but the participants were encouraged to shift attention to the left in response to large numbers and to the right in response to small numbers. No evidence for strong automaticity was observed, since the participants’ performance was better when left-side targets were preceded by large numbers than when they were preceded by small numbers and vice versa. Experiment 3 corroborated this pattern by comparing gaze- and number-mediated cuing under conditions of real counterpredictiveness. The results indicate that unlike gaze-driven orienting, number-mediated orienting is not obligatory.
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Part of the results reported here were presented at the joint meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, July 2005, Montreal. This research was supported in part by grants from MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca) and the University of Padua to C.U.
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Galfano, G., Rusconi, E. & Umiltà, C. Number magnitude orients attention, but not against one’s will. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 13, 869–874 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194011
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194011