The Automatic Mapping of Magnitude to Temporal Order Is Space-Dependent.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human Perception
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• Previous studies indicate that ordinal magnitude tasks show enhanced performance with ascending stimulus order.
• This suggests a mapping between magnitude and temporal order, where smaller magnitudes appear earlier and larger ones later.
• The automaticity and constraints of this magnitude-to-temporal-order mapping require further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the automaticity of the ascending order effect in magnitude perception.
• To identify the specific conditions and limitations under which this effect occurs.
• To explore the relationship between magnitude processing, temporal order, and spatial response mapping.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a 'same/different' task paradigm across three experiments.
• Experiment 1: Assessed magnitude processing for numerical stimuli.
• Experiment 2: Examined magnitude processing for physical sizes of shapes.
• Experiment 3: Investigated shape identity processing as a control.
• Varied response mapping conditions, specifically linking 'different' responses to the right hand.

Main Results:

• The ascending order advantage was observed for both numerical magnitude and physical size of shapes.
• This performance enhancement was contingent on magnitude processing being required by the task.
• The effect was further limited to trials where a 'different' response was associated with the right-hand side.

Conclusions:

• The automatic mapping of magnitude onto temporal order is not fully automatic and is subject to specific constraints.
• The findings highlight a dependency between the automaticity of magnitude-to-temporal-order mapping and the mapping of magnitude to spatial responses.
• This suggests that cognitive processes underlying magnitude perception are influenced by response selection and spatial coding.