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  -