TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hartmann, Matthias
A1  - Laubrock, Jochen
A1  - Fischer, Martin H.
T1  - The visual number world
BT  - a dynamic approach to study the mathematical mind
JF  - The quarterly journal of experimental psychology
N2  - In the domain of language research, the simultaneous presentation of a visual scene and its auditory description (i.e., the visual world paradigm) has been used to reveal the timing of mental mechanisms. Here we apply this rationale to the domain of numerical cognition in order to explore the differences between fast and slow arithmetic performance, and to further study the role of spatial-numerical associations during mental arithmetic. We presented 30 healthy adults simultaneously with visual displays containing four numbers and with auditory addition and subtraction problems. Analysis of eye movements revealed that participants look spontaneously at the numbers they currently process (operands, solution). Faster performance was characterized by shorter latencies prior to fixating the relevant numbers and fewer revisits to the first operand while computing the solution. These signatures of superior task performance were more pronounced for addition and visual numbers arranged in ascending order, and for subtraction and numbers arranged in descending order (compared to the opposite pairings). Our results show that the visual number world-paradigm provides on-line access to the mind during mental arithmetic, is able to capture variability in arithmetic performance, and is sensitive to visual layout manipulations that are otherwise not reflected in response time measurements.
KW  - Eye movements
KW  - Mental arithmetic
KW  - Mental number line
KW  - Visual world paradigm
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1240812
SN  - 1747-0218
SN  - 1747-0226
VL  - 71
IS  - 1
SP  - 28
EP  - 36
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  -