Spatial coding of object typical size: evidence for a SNARC-like effect

Abstract

The present study aimed to assess whether the representation of the typical size of objects can interact with response position codes in two-choice bimanual tasks, and give rise to a SNARC-like effect (faster responses when the representation of the typical size of the object to which the target stimulus refers corresponds to response side). Participants performed either a magnitude comparison task (in which they were required to judge whether the target was smaller or larger than a reference stimulus; Experiment 1) or a semantic decision task (in which they had to classify the target as belonging to either the category of living or non-living entities; Experiment 2). Target stimuli were pictures or written words referring to either typically large and small animals or inanimate objects. In both tasks, participants responded by pressing a left- or right-side button. Results showed that, regardless of the to-be-performed task (magnitude comparison or semantic decision) and stimulus format (picture or word), left responses were faster when the target represented typically small-sized entities, whereas right responses were faster for typically large-sized entities. These results provide evidence that the information about the typical size of objects is activated even if it is not requested by the task, and are consistent with the idea that objects' typical size is automatically spatially coded, as has been proposed to occur for number magnitudes. In this representation, small objects would be on the left and large objects would be on the right. Alternative interpretations of these results are also discussed.

Spatializing Emotion: No Evidence for a Domain‐General Magnitude System

“…However, here we show that these results can be explained by a Spatial Magnitude Mapping (see our Experiment 2b). Such an effect would not be surprising given people's tendencies to attend to the mouth when assessing emotional faces (Jack et al., ; Koda & Ruttkay, ) and to spatialize physical size from left to right even when size is irrelevant to the task (Ren et al., ; Sellaro et al., ). To the extent that participants were spatializing mouth size, the results of H&L's Experiments 1 and 2 do not bear on the spatialization of any dimension of emotion.…”

“…In one experiment, participants were faster to make speeded judgments on smaller circles with the left hand and larger circles with the right hand (Ren, Nicholls, Ma, & Chen, ), producing a dRT effect much like H&L's. In another experiment, people showed an implicit size mapping even when size was irrelevant to the task (Sellaro, Treccani, Job, & Cubelli, ).…”

Is Emotional Magnitude Spatialized? A Further Investigation

“…Additional support for a general magnitude system comes from studies showing that people implicitly associate smaller and larger magnitudes with the left and right sides of space, respectively. This left‐to‐right orientation of increasing quantities—initially regarded as specific to number (i.e., the classic Spatial‐Numerical Association of Response Codes [SNARC] effect; Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, ; for a meta‐analysis, see Wood, Willmes, Nuerk, & Fischer, )—has also been observed for non‐numerical magnitudes, including size (Ren, Nicholls, Ma, & Chen, ; Sellaro, Treccani, Job, & Cubelli, ), duration (Fabbri, Cancellieri, & Natale, ; Vallesi, Binns, & Shallice, ), and even abstract dimensions such as risk (Macnamara, Loetscher, & Keage, ), and may be supported by shared topographic organization in parietal cortex (Harvey, Fracasso, Petridou, & Dumoulin, ). Such findings suggest that different magnitudes may be spatialized according to a common mental metric (see also Holmes & Lourenco, ).…”

The mechanism of non-numerical anchoring heuristic based on magnitude priming: is it just the basic anchoring effect in disguise?

“…In other words, it is not just the numerical value that is derived from the presented number, but also its physical size. What is more, Sellaro, Treccani, Job and Cubelli (2015) showed in their study that the information about the size of the object is activated regardless to the goal of the task. Based on those results, simply asking to draw the presented number should suffice to acquire an adequate sense of magnitude emerging from the physical size.…”