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01-09-2007 | Original Article

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

Auteurs: Dana Müller, Wolf Schwarz

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 5/2007

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.

vorige artikel The effects of time pressure on chess skill: an investigation into fast and slow processes underlying expert performance

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

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

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.

The t value and SE refer to transformed error rates.

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Titel: Exploring the mental number line: evidence from a dual-task paradigm
Auteurs: Dana Müller
Wolf Schwarz
Publicatiedatum: 01-09-2007
Uitgeverij: Springer-Verlag
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 5/2007
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-006-0070-6

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