The Attentional-SNARC effect 16 years later: no automatic space–number association (taking into account finger counting style, imagery vividness, and learning style in 174 participants)

The Unbearable Lightness of Attentional Cuing by Symbolic Magnitude: Commentary on the Registered Replication Report by Colling et al.

“…The Registered Replication Report (RRR) by Colling et al (2020; this issue) is a welcome opportunity not only to assess the reliability of attentional shifts induced by viewing numbers, but also to examine influences of potentially moderating factors that were discovered since the original report (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003) of an attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (which already included a replication). The lack of an Att-SNARC effect in this replication project, at odds with other replications using similar methods (e.g., Dodd, Van der Stigchel, Leghari, Fung, & Kingstone, 2008; Galfano, Rusconi, & Umiltà, 2006; Ristic, Wright, & Kingstone, 2006), converges with another recent summary report with different statistical analyses (Pellegrino et al, 2019). Furthermore, no moderation through vividness of mental imagery or either verbal or visual learning styles of participants was found in that latter study.…”

“…Third, a limitation related to such strategy use is that neither the RRR itself nor the accompanying materials in the Open Science Framework repository report whether the potential Att-SNARC moderators examined in this project (finger-counting habits, experienced direction of reading and writing, handedness, math skills and math anxiety) were measured before testing, between blocks, or only after the experimentation (as in Pellegrino et al, 2019), or whether participants were explicitly informed about the noninformativeness of numbers (as in our original work) to discourage (or perhaps induce?) mapping strategies.…”

“…Average response speed also addresses the potential involvement of top-down strategies, such as number contextualization on a mental number line for further cognitive manipulation (cf. Pellegrino et al, 2019).…”

The Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes effect and math skills: why related?

“…replications showed that perceiving numbers alone does not cause involuntary spatial shifts of attention 57,58 . At the same time, when processing of numerical primes was enforced, the spatial effects (i.e., facilitation of detection times of left/right sided targets following small/large digit primes respectively) were more likely to be observed [59][60][61] .…”

What the Attentional-SNARC and its (null) replications can and cannot tell us

“…At the time of the writing of this sentence the original paper has been cited over 760 times. Direct and conceptual replication attempts of Att-SNARC have been made (Dodd et al, 2008;Fattorini et al, 2015Fattorini et al, , 2016Galfano et al, 2006;Pellegrino et al, 2019;Ristic & Kingstone, 2006;van Dijck et al, 2013;Zanolie & Pecher, 2014) with mixed outcomes. Importantly, most of the successful replications enforced semantic processing of numerical cues, for instance, by introducing catch trials (Cipora, He, et al, 2020 for an overview).…”