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One and only SNARC? Spatial-Numerical Associations are not fully flexible and depend on both relative and absolute number magnitude

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posted on 2025-01-13, 12:23 authored by Lilly Roth, John Caffier, Ulf-Dietrich Reips, Hans-Christoph Nuerk, Annika Tave Overlander, Krzysztof CiporaKrzysztof Cipora

Numbers are associated with space, but it is unclear how flexible these associations are. We investigated whether the SNARC effect (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes; Dehaene et al., 1993; i.e., faster responses to small/large number magnitude with the left/right hand, respectively) is fully flexible (depending only on relative magnitude within a stimulus set), or not (depending on absolute magnitude as well). Evidence for relative-magnitude dependency came from studies observing that numbers 4 and 5 were associated with the right when presented in a 0 – 5 range but with the left in a 4 – 9 range (Dehaene et al., 1993; Fias et al., 1996). However, this conclusion was drawn from the absence of evidence for absolute- magnitude dependency in frequentist analyses in underpowered studies. Within this Registered Report, we conducted two online experiments running Bayesian analyses with optional recruitment stopping at moderate evidence for (BF10 above 3) or against (BF10 below 1/3) each hypothesis. Experiment 1 (N = 200) replicated relative-magnitude dependency using the same stimuli as Fias et al. and Dehaene et al. However, Experiment 2 (N = 300) additionally demonstrated absolute-magnitude dependency, while considering recent advances in SNARC research (mainly by improving the stimulus sets and using 1 – 5 excluding 3 and 4 – 8 excluding 6). We conclude that the frequently perpetuated notion of fully flexible spatial-numerical associations is wrong. Some fixed relation to absolute magnitude prevails, especially for some numbers. We suggest that these findings have important consequences for how spatial-numerical associations might support numerical processing.

Funding

Centre for Early Mathematics Education (CEML) : ES/W002914/1

DFG project ‘Replicability of Fundamental Results on Spatial-Numerical Associations in Highly Powered Online Experiments (e-SNARC)’ (NU 265/8-1 and RE-2655/3-1)

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education

Published in

Royal Society Open Science

Volume

12

Publisher

The Royal Society

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

Acceptance date

2024-10-09

Publication date

2025-01-08

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

2054-5703

eISSN

2054-5703

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Krzysztof Cipora. Deposit date: 8 January 2025

Article number

241585

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