ABSTRACT

Previous research on the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) has demonstrated that SNARC-compatible digit arrangements are processed faster and more accurately than SNARC-incompatible arrangements. Concurrently, processing speed and accuracy have been conceptualised as indicating processing fluency – the ease of information processing – which has been shown to entail affective downstream consequences. Bridging these two research lines for the first time, we investigated whether digit arrangements that are compatible to this association are affectively preferred to association-incompatible digit arrangements. In a line of four experiments (total N = 786), German participants were asked to indicate how much they like the overall appearance of two digits that appear at the right and at the left side of the screen. Results from three of the four experiments suggest that digit arrangements that are compatible with this spatial-numerical association indeed trigger positive feelings. These preference patterns were not moderated by the horizontal distance between the two digits, pointing towards a stable phenomenon that is insensitive to contextual spatial cues.

摘要

先前对响应代码的空间数字关联 (SNARC) 的研究表明，与 SNARC 不兼容的排列相比，与 SNARC 兼容的数字排列处理得更快、更准确。同时，处理速度和准确性已被概念化为表明处理流畅性——信息处理的容易程度——已被证明会产生情感下游后果。我们首次将这两条研究线连接起来，研究了与这种关联兼容的数字排列是否比关联不兼容的数字排列在情感上更受欢迎。在一行四个实验中（总共N = 786），德国参与者被要求指出他们对出现在屏幕右侧和左侧的两位数字的整体外观的喜欢程度。四项实验中的三项的结果表明，与这种空间-数字关联兼容的数字排列确实会引发积极的情绪。这些偏好模式不受两个数字之间的水平距离的影响，指向一种对上下文空间线索不敏感的稳定现象。