It has been suggested that achievement in sports is correlated with a putative measure of prenatal testosterone the 2nd to 4th digit ratio (2D:4D). It has been shown that digit ratio (2D:4D) is negatively associated with prenatal testosterone, and it is also negatively associated with ability in sports. This study examined associations between 2D:4D and performance of both male and female Natio...

Brain-potential correlates of response conflict are well documented, but those of task conflict are not. Task-switching studies have suggested a plausible correlate of task conflict--a poststimulus posterior negativity--however, in such paradigms the negativity may also reflect poststimulus task-set reconfiguration postulated in some models. Here, participants alternated between single-task blo...

The size congruity effect is the interesting result that comparisons of the sizes of the physical formats in which numerals appear are affected by the numerical magnitudes of the respective numerals. We demonstrated that separating the physical and the numerical attributes in space leaves the effect unchanged. We then applied the spatially separated version to two-digit numerals and showed the ...

The authors investigated how 2-digit Arabic numerals are named by looking at the effects of masked primes on the naming latencies. Target numerals were named faster when prime and target shared a digit at the same position (e.g., the target 28 primed by 18 and 21). In contrast, naming latencies were slower when prime and target shared 1 or 2 digits at non-corresponding places (e.g., the target ...

The SNARC (Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect is the finding that small numbers elicit faster left than right responses and large numbers elicit faster right than left responses. This effect suggests that numbers activate left-right magnitude-laterality codes and that these codes interact with the selection of left-right responses. In the present research, subjects made par...

The inversion of number words influences numerical cognition even in seemingly non-verbal tasks, such as Arabic number comparison. However, it is an open question whether inversion of decades and units also influences number processing beyond the two-digit number range. The current study addresses this question by investigating compatibility effects in both German- (a language with inverted) an...

Two experiments which require subjects to hold a digit span while solving an equation and then recall the digit span are performed. The size of the memory span and the complexity of the equation are manipulated as well as whether the subject is required to substitute items from the digit span for constants in the equation. As either task (digit span recall or equation solving) gets more complex...

Response selection takes time. Hick's law (Hick, 1952) predicts that the time course of response selection is a logarithmic function of the number of equally likely response alternatives. However, recent work has shown that oculomotor responses constitute noteworthy exceptions in that the latencies of saccades (Kveraga, Boucher, & Hughes, 2002) and smooth pursuit movements (Berryhill, Kveraga, ...

It has been found in a numbr of tasks that the visual processing of an alphanumeric display is more effrcient when some of the items corne from an irrelevant category. For instance, it takes less time to find a digit in an array of lefters than in an array of other digis (e.g., Egeth, Jonides, & Wdl, 1972), and detection of a digit in a brief display is more accurate when the distractors are le...

Several kinds of statistical properties can be rapidly extracted from visual displays (e.g., luminance and roughness, Olive, A., & Torralba, A. (2001). Modeling the shape of the scene: a holistic representation of the spatial envelope. International Journal of Computational Vision, 42, 145-175). Here, we investigate whether this phenomenon extends to meaning contained in Arabic numerals. Observ...