Special issue: Original articleDigits affect actions: The SNARC effect and response selection
Section snippets
Method
Participants. Eighteen English speaking students (13 females, 5 males) participated in this experiment for course credit. Their ages ranged from 17 to 21 years, and the average age was 18.5 years. One participant was left handed, and all had normal, or corrected-to-normal, vision. All participants were naïve about the SNARC effect prior to debriefing.
Apparatus. Participants were seated before a monitor and keyboard in a dimly lit room. The aid of a chinrest kept the viewing distance at a
Results
The mean percentage of left hand responses for the neutral characters, low digits, and high digits appears in the upper portion of Table 1. Because there may be a predisposition for the participants to respond with one hand more than the other, different scores were calculated by subtracting the mean percentage of left keypresses to both low and high numbers from the mean percentage of left keypresses to the neutral symbol characters for each participant. In this manner we were able to measure
Discussion
The purpose of this experiment was to determine if the SNARC effect plays a role in determining which of two responses will be selected for action. To answer the question, a free-response paradigm was used in which participants were instructed to choose between making either a left or right keypress when a centrally presented stimulus (low digit, high digit, or neutral character) turned from white to green. The answer arising from the paradigm is a clear yes; low digits prompted participants to
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada to Jay Pratt.
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