TY  - JOUR
A1  - Felisatti, Arianna
A1  - Laubrock, Jochen
A1  - Shaki, Samuel
A1  - Fischer, Martin H.
T1  - A biological foundation for spatial–numerical associations
T2  - Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
N2  - "Left" and "right" coordinates control our spatial behavior and even influence abstract thoughts. For number concepts, horizontal spatial-numerical associations (SNAs) have been widely documented: we associate few with left and many with right. Importantly, increments are universally coded on the right side even in preverbal humans and nonhuman animals, thus questioning the fundamental role of directional cultural habits, such as reading or finger counting. Here, we propose a biological, nonnumerical mechanism for the origin of SNAs on the basis of asymmetric tuning of animal brains for different spatial frequencies (SFs). The resulting selective visual processing predicts both universal SNAs and their context-dependence. We support our proposal by analyzing the stimuli used to document SNAs in newborns for their SF content. As predicted, the SFs contained in visual patterns with few versus many elements preferentially engage right versus left brain hemispheres, respectively, thus predicting left-versus rightward behavioral biases. Our "brain's asymmetric frequency tuning" hypothesis explains the perceptual origin of horizontal SNAs for nonsymbolic visual numerosities and might be extensible to the auditory domain.
KW  - hemispheric asymmetry
KW  - numerical cognition
KW  - SNARC effect
KW  - spatial
KW  - frequency tuning
KW  - spatial-numerical associations
KW  - spatial vision
Y1  - 2020
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/59087
SN  - 0077-8923
SN  - 1749-6632
VL  - 1477
IS  - 1
SP  - 44
EP  - 53
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -