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. 2015 Jan 22:6:12.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00012. eCollection 2015.

Spatial biases during mental arithmetic: evidence from eye movements on a blank screen

Matthias Hartmann  1 , Fred W Mast  2 , Martin H Fischer  3
Affiliations

Spatial biases during mental arithmetic: evidence from eye movements on a blank screen

Matthias Hartmann et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

While the influence of spatial-numerical associations in number categorization tasks has been well established, their role in mental arithmetic is less clear. It has been hypothesized that mental addition leads to rightward and upward shifts of spatial attention (along the "mental number line"), whereas subtraction leads to leftward and downward shifts. We addressed this hypothesis by analyzing spontaneous eye movements during mental arithmetic. Participants solved verbally presented arithmetic problems (e.g., 2 + 7, 8-3) aloud while looking at a blank screen. We found that eye movements reflected spatial biases in the ongoing mental operation: Gaze position shifted more upward when participants solved addition compared to subtraction problems, and the horizontal gaze position was partly determined by the magnitude of the operands. Interestingly, the difference between addition and subtraction trials was driven by the operator (plus vs. minus) but was not influenced by the computational process. Thus, our results do not support the idea of a mental movement toward the solution during arithmetic but indicate a semantic association between operation and space.

Keywords: embodied cognition; eye movements; grounded cognition; mental arithmetic; mental number line; operational momentum.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mean Response Times (RT) for the different result sizes for addition and subtraction trials. Error bars depict ± 1 SEM.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean horizontal (A) and vertical (B) gaze position during mental arithmetic. Zero at the y-axis represents the center of the screen, and negative values left screen (A) or lower screen (B) positions. Data is corrected for the position at the onset of the operator and shows the development of the difference between addition and subtraction trials until the response is given (last data point). The gray area indicates statistically significant differences (significance criterion: p < 0.05 for at least 10 consecutive samples).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Horizontal gaze position as a function of the magnitude of the first operand.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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