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One direction? Cultural aspects of the mental number line beyond reading direction

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posted on 2025-05-09, 08:38 authored by Merve Bulut, Lilly Roth, Narjes Bahreini, Krzysztof CiporaKrzysztof Cipora, Ulf Dietrich Reips, Hans-Christoph Nuerk

Spatial-Numerical Associations (SNAs) refer to the demonstrations of spatial processing of numbers. The Mental Number Line (MNL) is a representation model describing numbers as aligning left-to-right (LR) and was suggested to account for directional biases in participants’ responses during numerical tasks. One common behavioral demonstration of this is the Spatial-Numerical Associations of Response Codes (SNARC) effect, which describes faster left-/right-hand responses to smaller/larger numbers, respectively. The MNL, and, consequently, directional SNAs, show variabilities across different cultures. Reading direction is considered to be the main factor in explaining these differences. In line with this, individuals with right-to-left (RL) reading habits show a weaker or even reverse SNARC effect. In the present study, we investigated whether SNAs are influenced not only by reading direction, but also by cultural directional preferences such as drawing lines, arranging objects, imagining objects (i.e., rightward or leftward facing), or representing events in time (i.e., mentally representing the past/future on the left/right, respectively). To test this hypothesis, we measured the cultural directional preferences and the SNARC effect across three cultures in an online setup; German, Turkish, and Iranian. LR preferences in the Cultural Directional Preferences Questionnaire were most prominent in German participants, intermediate in Turkish participants, and least prominent in Iranian participants. In line with this, the LR SNARC effect was strongest in German, intermediate in Turkish, and weakest (but not RL) in Iranian culture. These findings suggest that cultural directional preferences are involved in the emergence of adult SNAs in addition to the reading direction.

Funding

DFG project “Replicability of Fundamental Results on Spatial-Numerical Associations in Highly Powered Online Experiments (e-SNARC)” (NU 265/8–1)

Centre for Early Mathematics Learning

Economic and Social Research Council

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TUBITAK 2214-A International Research Fellow?ship Program

History

School

  • Science

Published in

Psychological Research

Volume

89

Issue

1

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2024-10-15

Publication date

2024-12-23

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

0340-0727

eISSN

1430-2772

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Krzysztof Cipora. Deposit date: 7 January 2025

Article number

37

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