Electrophysiological Correlates of the Interaction of Physical and Numerical Size in Symbolic Number Processing: Insights from a Novel Go/Nogo Numerical Stroop Task

Pekár, Judit; Hofmann, W.; Knakker, Balázs; Tamm, Sascha; Kinder, Annette

doi:10.3390/brainsci13050702

Cited by 1 publication

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References 52 publications

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“…Measuring inhibition is difficult because there are different types of inhibition. An important distinction has been made between interference control such as that measured by the Color Stroop task ( Bäumler, 1985 ) and response inhibition, which can be measured by go/nogo tasks ( Nigg, 2000 ; also Pekár et al, 2023 ). Furthermore, there may be multiple domain-specific control systems in the human brain ( Egner, 2008 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How learning influences non-symbolic numerical processing: effects of feedback in the dot comparison task

Hofmann,

Kinder,

Pekár

2024

Front. Psychol.

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It has long been debated how humans estimate the numerosity of sets of elements and what role continuous visual properties play in this process. The dot comparison task, in which the more numerous of two dot arrays must be selected, is a dominant method to investigate this phenomenon. It has been shown that the visual properties of the two dot patterns strongly influence the comparison. This influence can be systematically investigated by manipulating visual properties congruently and incongruently with numerosity. However, it remains unclear how learning and prior experience affect the influence of the visual properties. To address this question, we introduced feedback into the classical dot comparison task: during the learning phase, participants in the experimental group received feedback after each trial indicating whether their answer was correct whereas participants in the control group did not. After the learning phase, neither group received feedback. The convex hull of the dot patterns and the average dot diameter were manipulated congruently and incongruently with numerosity. Our results show that feedback had no effect on overall performance. However, when manipulated separately, dot diameter no longer affected performance in the experimental group after the learning phase, but it did in the control group. Moreover, this effect remained visible even when diameter and convex hull were manipulated simultaneously. This pattern of results is consistent with the notion of sensory integration which proposes that weights are assigned to different visual cues and that numerical judgments depend on an additive combination of these weights. We also found a correlation between performance on an arithmetic task and performance on trials in which dot size was manipulated incongruently with numerosity. However, there were no correlations between an inhibition task and performance in the dot comparison task. Taken together, the current results suggest that learning with feedback may affect some visual properties but not others. Future studies should further investigate a wider range of visual properties to examine which of them can be influenced by learning and under what conditions learning occurs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%