Concepts of order: Why is ordinality processed slower and less accurately for non-consecutive sequences?

Abstract

Both adults and children are slower at judging the ordinality of non-consecutive sequences (e.g., 1-3-5) than consecutive sequences (e.g., 1-2-3). It has been suggested that the processing of non-consecutive sequences is slower because it conflicts with the intuition that only count-list sequences are correctly ordered. An alternative explanation, however, may be that people simply find it difficult to switch between consecutive and non-consecutive concepts of order during order judgement tasks. Therefore, in adult participants, we tested whether presenting consecutive and non-consecutive sequences separately would eliminate this switching demand and thus improve performance. In contrast with this prediction, however, we observed similar patterns of response times independent of whether sequences were presented separately or together (Experiment 1). Furthermore, this pattern of results remained even when we doubled the number of trials and made participants explicitly aware when consecutive and non-consecutive sequences were presented separately (Experiment 2). Overall, these results suggest slower response times for non-consecutive sequences do not result from a cognitive demand of switching between consecutive and non-consecutive concepts of order, at least not in adults.

Familiar Sequences Are Processed Faster Than Unfamiliar Sequences, Even When They Do Not Match the Count‐List

“…In fact, it was demonstrated that distance and direction still explained unique variance in response times beyond the effect of familiarity. Likewise, these findings do not negate the possibility that a count-list bias contributes to order processing performance (but see Devlin, Moeller, Xenidou-Dervou, Reynvoet, & Sella, 2023).…”

“…This effect is reversed relative to the standard distance effect observed in magnitude comparison tasks whereby judgments become faster as the numerical distance between compared digits increases (e.g., Moyer & Landauer, 1967;Sekuler & Mierkiewicz, 1977). However, viewing the reverse distance effect in order processing as analogous to the standard distance effect observed in magnitude processing has been discouraged (Devlin et al, 2022(Devlin et al, , 2023. This is because, instead of response times increasing linearly as the numerical distance between digits increases, the effect appears specific to distances of 1.…”