When adding is right: Temporal order judgements reveal spatial attention shifts during two-digit mental arithmetic

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• Previous research suggests arithmetic operations influence attention.
• Studies often use simplified tasks (single-digit arithmetic, verification) that may not reflect complex mental calculations.
• The role of visuospatial attention in complex arithmetic remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate spatial attention shifts during the active solution of two-digit arithmetic problems.
• To examine the temporal dynamics of arithmetically induced attention shifts.
• To explore how task difficulty (carry vs. non-carry) affects these shifts.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a temporal order judgment (TOJ) paradigm with sequentially presented lateralized targets.
• Measured spatial attention shifts by varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and delay between arithmetic problem and TOJ task.
• Included a baseline TOJ to control for spontaneous attentional biases.

Main Results:

• Addition problems consistently induced rightward shifts in spatial attention.
• No significant difference in attention shifts was found between carry and non-carry conditions.
• Subtraction problems did not elicit observable spatial attention shifts.
• The influence of delay on attention shifts was inconsistent across experiments.

Conclusions:

• Complex addition recruits visuospatial attention mechanisms, shifting focus to the right.
• Subtraction may engage different cognitive or attentional processes.
• Task difficulty, as manipulated by carry operations, did not significantly modulate attention shifts in addition.