Craig Leth-Steensen of Carleton University will be giving the talk “ Instructional Dependency of SNARC Effects in Paired Comparison” at noon in room 2203 of Dunton Tower.
http://carleton.ca/ics/colloquia-2/

Abstract of talk:

In typical experiments studying the SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect, single-digit stimuli are presented which are judged to be either even/odd or smaller/larger than 5. In such studies, faster left-hand responses are observed for smaller digits and faster right-hand responses are observed for larger digits. However, SNARC effects are also present when comparing the numerical magnitudes of pairs of digits. For such comparisons, faster left-hand responses occur for comparison pairs that contain smaller numbers and faster right-hand responses occur for comparison pairs that contain larger numbers. Furthermore, SNARC-like effects can also be found when comparing pairs of animal sizes. In this case, though, the nature of the effect reverses depending on the direction of the comparison (i.e., when choosing the smaller versus choosing the larger animal in the pair). In this talk, I will discuss two cases involving papers I’ve reviewed recently where the researchers found such effects (for comparisons of order relations and the numerosity of dot arrays, respectively) but didn’t realize it. I will also present some new results demonstrating that instruction-dependent SNARC effects are present for paired magnitude comparison of number words.