Abstract
Behavioural studies have suggested that number manipulation involves shifting attention along a left-to-right oriented continuum. However, these studies provide little evidence about the time course of attention shifts during number processing. We used an eye-tracker with high spatio-temporal resolution to measure eye movements during the mental solving of addition (e.g., 43 + 4) and subtraction problems (e.g., 53 − 6), as a proxy for the rightward and leftward attention shifts that accompany these operations. A first difference in eye position was observed as soon as the operator was heard: the hearing of “plus” shifted the eye rightward compared to “minus”. A second difference was observed later between problem offset and response onset: addition shifted the eye rightward and upward compared to subtraction, suggesting that the space used to represent the problem is bidimensional. Further analyses confirmed the fast deployment of spatial attention and evidenced its relationship with the carrying and borrowing procedures triggered by the problem presentation. The predictive role of horizontal eye movements, in particular, is essential to understand how attention contributes to narrow down the range of plausible answers. We propose that attention illuminates significant portions of the numerical continuum anticipatively to guide the search of the answer and facilitate the implementation of solving procedures in verbal working memory.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available on OSF following this link: https://osf.io/nuem8/?view_only=04b36c6c1e7e4bec889186ee34f8dd53.
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The custom codes written for the current study are available on OSF following this link: https://osf.io/nuem8/.
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Acknowledgements
M.A. is a research associate at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS, Belgium) and N.M. is a post-doc researcher supported by grant PDR-T.0047.18 from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS, Belgium) and Grant FNR-INTER/FNRS/17/1178524 from the National Research Fund of Luxembourg (FNR, Luxembourg). This research was supported by grant PDR-FNRS T.0245.16 from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS, Belgium). AZ is a research associate at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, funded by IdEx Junior Chair and ANR JCJC (ANR-18-CE37-0009-01) Grants.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by SS and MA. The first draft of the manuscript was written by SS and all authors commented on the different versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The experimental procedure was approved by the ethical committee of the Psychological Sciences Research Institute at UCLouvain (B403201629166). Moreover, as indicated in the method section of our paper, we followed scrupulously the ethical principles proposed by the Helsinki declaration of the World Medical Association. Participants were major (> 18 in Belgium) (Principle 19). The data was collected and stored under randomly assigned numbers to preserve anonymity and confidentiality (Principle 9–24). There was no risk linked with the experiments as it was a short number comparison task on a desktop (max 30 min); however, participants were monetarily compensated for their time (Principle 14-15-16-17-18). Participants were systematically invited to give their written informed consent prior to the experiment The informed consent document contained all the information about the experiment being done (length, presence of the eye-tracker, number comparison task), information about the anonymity and confidentiality of the data, and the information that the consent could be retracted without prejudice. In this last case, participants were informed in the consent that they were free to leave at any time and that they could keep the full amount of the monetary compensation (Principle 26-27-31).
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Salvaggio, S., Masson, N., Zénon, A. et al. The predictive role of eye movements in mental arithmetic. Exp Brain Res 240, 1331–1340 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-022-06329-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-022-06329-3