Experimental Evidence From Newborn Chicks Enriches Our Knowledge on Human Spatial–Numerical Associations

Núñez and Fias raised concerns on whether our results demonstrate a linear number‐space mapping. Patro and Nuerk urge caution on the use of animal models to understand the origin (cultural vs. biological) of the orientation of spatial–numerical association. Here, we discuss why both objections are unfounded.     

Orienting numbers in mental space: Horizontal organization trumps vertical

While research on the spatial representation of number has provided substantial evidence for a horizontally oriented mental number line, recent studies suggest vertical organization as well. Directly comparing the relative strength of horizontal and vertical organization, however, we found no evidence of spontaneous vertical orientation (upward or downward), and horizontal trumped vertical when pitted against each other (Experiment 1). Only when numbers were conceptualized as magnitudes (as opposed to nonmagnitude ordinal sequences) did reliable vertical organization emerge, with upward orientation preferred (Experiment 2). Altogether, these findings suggest that horizontal representations predominate, and that vertical representations, when elicited, may be relatively inflexible. Implications for spatial organization beyond number, and its ontogenetic basis, are discussed.     

The associations between space and order in numerical and non-numerical sequences

Spatial-numerical associations have been found across different studies, yet the basis for these associations remains debated. The current study employed an order judgment task to adjudicate between two competing accounts of such associations, namely the Mental Number Line (MNL) and Working Memory (WM) models. On this task, participants judged whether number pairs were in ascending or descending order. Whereas the MNL model predicts that ascending and descending orders should map onto opposite sides of space, the WM model predicts no such mapping. Moreover, we compared the spatial-order mapping for numerical and non-numerical sequences because the WM model predicts no difference in mapping. Across two experiments, we found consistent spatial mappings for numerical order along both horizontal and vertical axes, consistent with a MNL model. In contrast, we found no consistent mappings for letter sequences. These findings are discussed in the context of conflicting extant data related to these two models.     

Components representation of negative numbers: Evidence from auditory stimuli detection and number classification tasks

Past research suggested that negative numbers could be represented in terms of their components in the visual modality. The present study examined the processing of negative numbers in the auditory modality and whether it is affected by context. Experiment 1 employed a stimuli detection task where only negative numbers were presented binaurally. Experiment 2 employed the same task, but both positive and negative numbers were mixed as cues. A reverse attentional spatial–numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect for negative numbers was obtained in these two experiments. Experiment 3 employed a number classification task where only negative numbers were presented binaurally. Experiment 4 employed the same task, but both positive and negative numbers were mixed. A reverse SNARC effect for negative numbers was obtained in these two experiments. These findings suggest that negative numbers in the auditory modality are generated from the set of positive numbers, thus supporting a components representation.     

Dynamic self‐representation of interdependent Chinese: The effect of bicultural experience

The process of globalisation has increased the opportunity for Chinese individuals to utilise influences from other cultures that differ from their own collectivistic culture. The explorations of the impact of acculturation on Chinese individuals' self‐construals have become intriguing. Thus, we recruited German‐Chinese (N = 192) people who live in Germany and had direct bicultural experiences, as well as Mainland‐Chinese (N = 192) people who live in Mainland China and had internalised a second culture through more indirect means of exposure. We investigated their accessibility to both interdependent and independent cultural frameworks using temporal self‐construal priming. The results showed that priming effects were observed in both cultural groups. However, the self‐construals of the German‐Chinese participants were more flexible than those of Mainland‐Chinese under self‐construal priming. Also, the results suggested that women were easier to be influenced by direct bicultural experiences, due to their private and collective self were different between the two cultures. These findings provide evidence regarding the opinion that individuals could use influences from more than one culture. More importantly, these results suggest that the acculturation induced by direct bicultural experiences facilitates cultural frame switching.     

Rapid communication The mental number line dominates alternative,explicit coding of number magnitude

Numerical judgments are facilitated for left-space responses to a smaller number and right-space responses to a larger number (the spatial–numerical association of response codes, SNARC, effect). Despite support for a mental number line (i.e., spatial) explanation of the SNARC effect, this account has been challenged by an intermediate-coding theory that makes use of a polarity-correspondence principle. The latter is a general explanatory framework whereby stimulus and response dimensions are represented in a categorical, binary manner, with complementary categories coded as having either positive or negative polarity. When stimulus and response polarity match, responding is facilitated. In the present experiment we pitted explicitly presented close–far coding against an implicit mental number line (i.e., left–right coding). Subjects categorized numbers (1, 4, 6, and 9) as greater or less than a standard (5) using keys defined only as close to and far from a starting key. We found that, despite instructing subjects to use a close–far coding scheme, they exhibited a typical SNARC effect, with small-number responses facilitated on the left and large-number responses on the right. These results are discussed in the context of results supporting the polarity explanation and with respect to representational pluralism.     

Place‐value understanding in number line estimation predicts future arithmetic performance

In multi‐digit numbers, the value of each digit is determined by its position within the digit string. Children's understanding of this place‐value structure constitutes a building block for later arithmetic skills. We investigated whether a number line estimation task can provide an assessment of place‐value understanding in first grade. We hypothesized that estimating the position of two‐digit numbers requires place‐value understanding. Therefore, we fitted a linear function to children's estimates of two‐digit numbers and considered the resulting slope as a measure of children's place‐value understanding. We observed a significant correlation between this slope and children's performance in a transcoding task known to require place‐value understanding. Additionally, the slope for two‐digit numbers assessed at the beginning of grade 1 predicted children's arithmetic performance at the end of grade 1. These results indicate that the number line estimation task may indeed constitute a valid measure for first‐graders' place‐value understanding. Moreover, these findings are hard to reconcile with the view that number line estimation directly assesses a spatial representation of numbers. Instead, our results suggest that numerical processes involved in performing the task (such as place‐value understanding) may drive the association between number line estimation and arithmetic performance.     

The Role of Gesture in Supporting Mental Representations: The Case of Mental Abacus Arithmetic

People frequently gesture when problem‐solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus (MA), a technique in which users not only imagine moving beads on an abacus to compute sums, but also produce movements in gestures that accompany the calculations. Because the content of MA is transparent and readily manipulated, the task offers a unique window onto how gestures interface with mental representations. We find that the size and number of MA gestures reflect the length and difficulty of math problems. Also, by selectively interfering with aspects of gesture, we find that participants perform significantly worse on MA under motor interference, but that perceptual feedback is not critical for success on the task. We conclude that premotor processes involved in the planning of gestures are critical to mental representation in MA.     

The relationships between quantity‐number competencies,working memory,and phonological awareness in 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds

In this study, the interdependencies among phonological awareness, verbal working memory components, and early numerical skills in children 1 year before school entry are addressed. Early numerical skills were conceptualized as quantity‐number competencies (QNC) at both basic (QNC Level 1) and advanced (QNC Level 2) levels. In a sample of 1,343 children aged 5 and 6, structural equation modelling provided support for the isolated number words hypothesis (Krajewski & Schneider, 2009, J. Exp. Child Psychol., 103, 516–531). This hypothesis claims that phonological awareness contributes to the acquisition of QNC Level 1, such as learning the number word sequence, but not of QNC Level 2, which requires the linkage of number words to quantities. In addition, phonological awareness relied on verbal working memory, especially with regard to the phonological loop, central executive, and episodic buffer. The results were congruent with the idea that phonological awareness mediates the impact of verbal working memory on QNCs. The relationships between verbal working memory, phonological awareness, and QNCs were comparable in monolingual and bilingual children.     

Making the Invisible Visible: Identifying and Articulating Culture in Practice‐Based Evidence

This study describes a conceptual tool, labeled the “culture cube,” developed to identify and articulate the cultural underpinnings of prevention and early intervention projects in five priority populations (i.e., African American, Asian Pacific Islander, Latino, Native American, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning), participating in the California Reducing Disparities Project Phase 2 (CRDP Phase 2). The culture cube was developed for evaluation of these practice‐based evidence services (PBEs) for three purposes: (a) to focus attention on revealing and articulating more fully the operative worldview and culturally grounded frameworks underlying PBEs, explicitly identifying the links between cultural beliefs and values, community needs, and intervention design; (b) to guide the methods used to assess and evaluate PBEs so that the outcome indicators and process measures are conceptually consistent, community defined, and culturally centered; and (c) to invite communities to use their own indigenous epistemological frameworks to establish credible evidence. After reviewing the literature in this area and describing the theoretical framework for the culture cube, we describe its development, application, and the response to its use in the initial stages of the California Reducing Disparities Project‐Phase 2.     

Moving attention along the mental number line in preschool age: Study of the operational momentum in 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children's non‐symbolic arithmetic

People tend to underestimate subtraction and overestimate addition outcomes and to associate subtraction with the left side and addition with the right side. These two phenomena are collectively labeled 'operational momentum' (OM) and thought to have their origins in the same mechanism of 'moving attention along the mental number line'. OM in arithmetic has never been tested in children at the preschool age, which is critical for numerical development. In this study, 3–5 years old were tested with non‐symbolic addition and subtraction tasks. Their level of understanding of counting principles (CP) was assessed using the give‐a‐number task. When the second operand's cardinality was 5 or 6 (Experiment 1), the child's reaction time was shorter in addition/subtraction tasks after cuing attention appropriately to the right/left. Adding/subtracting one element (Experiment 2) revealed a more complex developmental pattern. Before acquiring CP, the children showed generalized overestimation bias. Underestimation in addition and overestimation in subtraction emerged only after mastering CP. No clear spatial‐directional OM pattern was found, however, the response time to rightward/leftward cues in addition/subtraction again depended on stage of mastering CP. Although the results support the hypothesis about engagement of spatial attention in early numerical processing, they point to at least partial independence of the spatial‐directional and magnitude OM. This undermines the canonical version of the number line‐based hypothesis. Mapping numerical magnitudes to space may be a complex process that undergoes reorganization during the period of acquisition of symbolic representations of numbers. Some hypotheses concerning the role of spatial‐numerical associations in numerical development are proposed.     

The mental time line: An analogue of the mental number line in the mapping of life events

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition.     

Extra‐powerful on the visuo‐perceptual space,but variable on the number space: Different effects of optokinetic stimulation in neglect patients

We studied the effects of optokinetic stimulation (OKS; leftward, rightward, control) on the visuo‐perceptual and number space, in the same sample, during line bisection and mental number interval bisection tasks. To this end, we tested six patients with right‐hemisphere damage and neglect, six patients with right‐hemisphere damage but without neglect, and six neurologically healthy participants. In patients with neglect, we found a strong effect of leftward OKS on line bisection, but not on mental number interval bisection. We suggest that OKS influences the number space only under specific conditions.     

The Semantic Drift of Quotations in Blogspace: A Case Study in Short‐Term Cultural Evolution

We present an empirical case study that connects psycholinguistics with the field of cultural evolution, in order to test for the existence of cultural attractors in the evolution of quotations. Such attractors have been proposed as a useful concept for understanding cultural evolution in relation with individual cognition, but their existence has been hard to test. We focus on the transformation of quotations when they are copied from blog to blog or media website: by coding words with a number of well‐studied lexical features, we show that the way words are substituted in quotations is consistent (a) with the hypothesis of cultural attractors and (b) with known effects of the word features. In particular, words known to be harder to recall in lists have a higher tendency to be substituted, and words easier to recall are produced instead. Our results support the hypothesis that cultural attractors can result from the combination of individual cognitive biases in the interpretation and reproduction of representations.     

Understanding and using the implicit association test: V. measuring semantic aspects of trait self‐concepts

Implicit Association Tests (IATs) often reveal strong associations of self with positive rather than negative attributes. This poses a problem in using the IAT to measure associations involving traits with either positive or negative evaluative content. In two studies, we employed non‐bipolar but evaluatively balanced Big Five traits as attribute contrasts and explored correlations of IATs with positive (e.g. sociable vs. conscientious) or negative (e.g. reserved vs. chaotic) attributes. Results showed (a) satisfactory internal consistencies for all IATs, (b) explicit–explicit and implicit–implicit correlations that were moderate to high and comparable in strength after both were corrected for attenuation and (c) better model fit for latent variable models that linked the implicit and explicit measures to distinct latent factors rather to the same factor. Together, the results suggest that IATs can validly assess the semantic aspect of trait self‐concepts and that implicit and explicit self‐representations are, although correlated, also distinct constructs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Essentialized Self: Implications for Motivation and Self‐Regulation

Persuasion attempts are more likely to stick and less likely to be counterargued if they fit the ways people naturally make sense of themselves and their world. One way to do that is to yoke persuasion to the social categories people experience as “true” and “natural.” Gelman and Echelbarger's (2019) integrative review of essentialism outlines the emergence of essentialism in children's reasoning. Connecting their discussion with identity‐based motivation theory (D. Oyserman, 2015) and a culture‐as‐situated cognition (D. Oyserman, 2017) perspective, this commentary addresses how an essentialized self can facilitate or impair motivation and self‐regulation and potentiate or undermine persuasive efforts.     

Rethinking Concepts in Participatory Action Research and Their Potential for Social Transformation: Post‐structuralist Informed Methodological Reflections from LGBT and Trans‐Collective Projects

Participatory Action Research (PAR) aims to articulate knowledge production and transformative action. In this paper, we outline the sociopolitical background to our interest in LGBT and trans‐collectives as an important territory where PAR might make some intervention in the social conditions of LGBT lives by transforming dominant forms of representation that have emerged from a history of psychological and medical pathology. We present two projects, from UK and Spain that utilize post‐structuralist informed methods (interviews, photo‐production, discourse analysis, narrative production) within a PAR framework. We examine their potential for problematising representations of sexuality and gender by reflecting on the knowledge produced and the transformative action they provoke. We rethink power relationships inherent in PAR concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ through a post‐structuralist lens and argue that the achievements of PAR projects can be better understood as ‘co‐produced artifacts’. These (e.g. photo‐exhibition) are co‐owned by community members and researchers and their deployment in different settings (e.g. community or university) impacts on the meanings they convey and the action they provoke. Finally, we argue that through the use of post‐structuralist methods PAR can enable effective transformative action, but caution against the practice of reinstating normative representations in the invitation to participate under specific identity categories (e.g. LGBT, Trans, mental health service user). PAR projects can do this by considering naturalized definitions of who is vulnerable or marginalized as the object and field of social transformation, and the starting point for collective and political action. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inter‐ and intrapersonal processes underlying authoritarianism: The role of social conformity and personal need for structure

Several personality constructs have been theorised to underlie right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA). In samples from New Zealand and Germany (Ns = 218, 259), we tested whether these constructs can account for specific variance in RWA. In both samples, social conformity and personal need for structure were independent predictors of RWA. In Sample 2, where also openness to experience was measured, social conformity and personal need for structure fully mediated the impact of the higher‐order factor of openness on RWA. Our results contribute to the integration of current approaches to the personality basis of authoritarianism and suggest that two distinct personality processes contribute to RWA: An interpersonal process related to social conformity and an intrapersonal process related to rigid cognitive style. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Goal Circuit Model: A Hierarchical Multi‐Route Model of the Acquisition and Control of Routine Sequential Action in Humans

Human control of action in routine situations involves a flexible interplay between (a) task‐dependent serial ordering constraints; (b) top‐down, or intentional, control processes; and (c) bottom‐up, or environmentally triggered, affordances. In addition, the interaction between these influences is modulated by learning mechanisms that, over time, appear to reduce the need for top‐down control processes while still allowing those processes to intervene at any point if necessary or if desired. We present a model of the acquisition and control of goal‐directed action that goes beyond existing models by operationalizing an interface between two putative systems—a routine and a non‐routine system—thereby demonstrating how explicitly represented goals can interact with the emergent task representations that develop through learning in the routine system. The gradual emergence of task representations offers an explanation for the transfer of control with experience from the non‐routine goal‐based system to the routine system. At the same time it allows action selection to be sensitive both to environmental triggers and to biasing from multiple levels within the goal system.     

Skin picking in patients with obesity: Associations with impulsiveness and self‐harm

Previous studies suggest elevated prevalence rates of skin picking and self‐harm in patients with obesity compared to individuals in the general population. Hence, further studies should investigate prevalence rates and correlates of skin picking in this population – especially its differentiation to self‐harm. Skin picking and obesity are both associated with specific facets of impulsiveness. This relation should be explored to shed light on potentially shared mechanisms in etiology. Therefore, the present study examined the occurrence of skin picking and its associations with impulsiveness and self‐harm in a sample of pre‐bariatric surgery patients with obesity class II/III. Within the routine preoperative psychiatric evaluation, a total of 139 bariatric surgery candidates (78% female, BMI range 35–69) completed a self‐report questionnaire assessing sociodemographic variables, anxiety, depression, self‐harm, impulsiveness, and skin picking severity (urges: frequency, intensity, controllability; behavior: frequency, intensity, controllability; resistance, emotional distress, impairment, and avoidance). Ten participants (7.2% of the sample) reported recurrent skin picking leading to skin damage, repeated attempts to decrease skin picking, and psychosocial impairment (emotional distress, impairment in functional areas, avoidance) due to skin picking. In line with previous findings, skin picking severity shows a medium correlation with attentional impulsiveness. The majority of self‐harm types were not associated with skin picking severity. The current study reveals a high occurrence of skin picking compared to the general population. The results indicate an association between skin picking severity and attentional impulsiveness. Further research is needed to investigate the differentiation of skin picking and self‐harm in more detail.