The role of cognitive control in the SNARC effect: A review

Abstract

The spatial‐numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect, in which people respond to small numbers faster with the left hand and to large numbers faster with the right hand, is a popular topic in cognitive psychology. Some well‐known theoretical accounts explaining this effect include the mental number line model, polarity correspondence principle, dual‐route model, and working memory account. However, these fail to explain the finding that the size of the SNARC effect is modulated by cognitive control. Here, we propose a new account—a cognitive control‐based view of the SNARC effect. This view argues that the SNARC effect is fundamentally determined by cognitive control in resolving conflicts during stimulus–response mapping. Several subcomponents of cognitive control, such as working memory, mental or task set shifting, inhibition control, and conflict adaptation, can easily modulate the SNARC effect. The cognitive control‐based view can account for the flexible SNARC effect observed in diverse task situations while providing new insight into its mechanism.

Regional specificity of cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation effects on spatial–numerical associations: Comparison of four stimulation sites

“…A possible explanation for these neuromodulation results is the dependence of the SNARC effect on working memory functions which are hosted in the PFC (Arsalidou & Taylor, 2011;Baddeley, 2000;D'Esposito & Postle, 2015). This is consistent with the flexible assignments of spatial codes to numbers in working memory (Abrahamse et al, 2016;van Dijck et al, 2009;van Dijck & Fias, 2011), which indicated that numbers can be associated with different spatial codes based on working memory information (Abrahamse et al, 2016;Fischer et al, 2010;van Dijck et al, 2009;van Dijck & Fias, 2011;Zhang et al, 2022).…”

“…This is consistent with the flexible assignments of spatial codes to numbers in working memory (Abrahamse et al., 2016; van Dijck et al., 2009; van Dijck & Fias, 2011), which indicated that numbers can be associated with different spatial codes based on their position in a maintained working memory sequence. Precisely, in their experimental settings, left hand responses were faster than right hand responses to numbers at the beginning of a verbal working memory sequence, suggesting that numbers can be flexibly associated and even reversed with different spatial codes based on working memory information (Abrahamse et al., 2016; Fischer et al., 2010; van Dijck et al., 2009; van Dijck & Fias, 2011; Zhang et al., 2022).…”