TY - JOUR A1 - Schwarz, Wolfgang A1 - Eiselt, Anne-Kathrin T1 - The perception of temporal order along the mental number line N2 - R. Sekuler, P. Tynan, and E. Levinson (1973) found that when 2 characters are presented side-by-side with a short onset asynchrony, subjectively, they often appear in a "first-left, then-right" order. The authors of this article conducted 6 experiments in which observers judged the temporal order (TOJs) in which 2 digits were presented. They found a consistent TOJ benefit (larger d') when the numerically smaller digit was presented first, even though this semantic information was irrelevant to the task and unrelated to the correct response. They concluded that digits located to the left of the mental number line are transmitted faster to a central comparison stage, which represents an "internal counterpart" to the Sekuler et al. (1973) finding regarding external locations. A corresponding benefit is found for letters pairs (e.g., A-Z) and also for mixed digit-letter pairs (e.g., I-Z). Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/xhp/index.aspx U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/A0013703 SN - 0096-1523 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schwarz, Wolfgang A1 - Eiselt, Anne-Kathrin T1 - Numerical distance effects in visual search JF - Attention, perception, & psychophysics : AP&P ; a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc. N2 - We present three experiments in which observers searched for a target digit among distractor digits in displays in which the mean numerical target-distractor distance was varied. Search speed and accuracy increased with numerical distance in both target-present and target-absent trials (Exp. 1A). In Experiment 1B, the target 5 was replaced with the letter S. The results suggest that the findings of Experiment 1A do not simply reflect the fact that digits that were numerically closer to the target coincidentally also shared more physical features with it. In Experiment 2, the numerical distance effect increased with set size in both target-present and target-absent trials. These findings are consistent with the view that increasing numerical target-distractor distance affords faster nontarget rejection and target identification times. Recent neurobiological findings (e.g., Nieder, 2011) on the neuronal coding of numerosity have reported a width of tuning curves of numerosity-selective neurons that suggests graded, distance-dependent coactivation of the representations of adjacent numbers, which in visual search would make it harder to reject numerically closer distractors as nontargets. KW - Numerical distance effect KW - Visual search KW - Category effect KW - Mental number line KW - Numerical magnitude Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-012-0342-8 SN - 1943-3921 VL - 74 IS - 6 SP - 1098 EP - 1103 PB - Springer CY - New York ER -