16:30 - 18:00
Mon-B21-Talk III-
Mon-Talk III-
Room: B21
Chair/s:
Christian Seegelke, Peter Wühr
During the last decades, researchers discovered and investigated a multitude of cross-dimensional S-R compatibility effects between different stimulus and response dimensions, including quantities, valence, and space. A prominent example is the SNARC (spatial-numerical association of response codes) effect, which describes the fact that human participants are faster and more accurate when responding to small numbers with a left rather than right response, and vice versa. Similar compatibility effects occur when physical size (spatial-size association of response code, SSARC) or valence varies as a stimulus feature, and participants respond with spatially distinct responses. Both the etiology and the structural sources of these compatibility effects are a matter of considerable debate. For many cross-dimensional compatibility effects, both local accounts (e.g., the mental number line as an explanation for the SNARC effect) and global accounts, which attempt to explain several phenomena through a general principle (e.g., a theory of magnitude; polarity correspondence) have been proposed. In this symposium, we present new research on different, cross-dimensional compatibility effects. Two contributions deal with the SNARC effect (Miklashevsky, Lindemann, & Fischer; Wühr & Richter), two talks report on the SSARC effect (e.g., Seegelke & Wühr; Wühr, Richter, & Seegelke), and a fifth contribution is concerned with valence-space interactions (Kühne, Nenaschew, & Miklashevsky). Based on these and other results, we evaluate similarities and differences between different compatibility effects, and discuss the plausibility of global accounts for these effects.
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Strength differences between dominant and non-dominant hand are related to a compatibility effect between stimulus size and left/right responses
Mon-B21-Talk III-05
Presented by: Peter Wühr
Peter Wühr 1, Melanie Richter 1, Christian Seegelke 2
1 Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, 2 University of Salzburg, Austria
The term SSARC (spatial-size association of response codes) effect refers to faster left-hand responses to physically smaller stimuli and faster right-hand responses to physically larger stimuli, as compared to the reverse conditions. This compatibility effect suggests an overlap between cognitive representations of physical size and space. We report an experiment in which we test a hypothesis about the origin of the SSARC effect. We started from the fact that the dominant hand is often stronger than the non-dominant hand. Hence, we reasoned that the SSARC effect might be a consequence of the habit to grasp larger (and heavier) objects with the dominant hand, but smaller (and lighter) objects with the non-dominant hand. Our experiment with 80 right-handed and 80 left-handed participants consisted of two parts. In part one, we measured the forces of left and right fingers, hands, and arms, respectively, for each participant. In part two, participants faced a choice-response task, in which they pressed a left or right key to a small or large stimulus. The S-R mapping (small-left / large-right or small-right / large-left) varied within participants. There were three major results. Firstly, the dominant effector was stronger than the non-dominant effector. Secondly, the SSARC effect was stronger in right-handers than in left-handers. Thirdly, individual strength differences between dominant and non-dominant effectors were correlated with the size of the individual SSARC effect. Our results support the hypothesis that strength differences between the dominant and the non-dominant hand may have contributed to the origin of the SSARC effect.
Keywords: compatibility, handedness, strength, stimulus size, response location
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