A biological foundation for spatial–numerical associations: the brain's asymmetric frequency tuning
| Autor: | Martin H. Fischer, Arianna Felisatti, Jochen Laubrock, Samuel Shaki |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
media_common.quotation_subject
Numerical cognition 050105 experimental psychology General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology Lateralization of brain function Visual processing 03 medical and health sciences Cognition 0302 clinical medicine History and Philosophy of Science Perception Reading (process) Reaction Time Animals Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Finger-counting Control (linguistics) media_common Behavior Animal General Neuroscience 05 social sciences Brain Animals Newborn Reading Space Perception Visual Perception Spatial frequency Psychology Photic Stimulation 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1477:44-53 |
| ISSN: | 1749-6632 0077-8923 |
| Popis: | "Left" and "right" coordinates control our spatial behavior and even influence abstract thoughts. For number concepts, horizontal spatial-numerical associations (SNAs) have been widely documented: we associate few with left and many with right. Importantly, increments are universally coded on the right side even in preverbal humans and nonhuman animals, thus questioning the fundamental role of directional cultural habits, such as reading or finger counting. Here, we propose a biological, nonnumerical mechanism for the origin of SNAs on the basis of asymmetric tuning of animal brains for different spatial frequencies (SFs). The resulting selective visual processing predicts both universal SNAs and their context-dependence. We support our proposal by analyzing the stimuli used to document SNAs in newborns for their SF content. As predicted, the SFs contained in visual patterns with few versus many elements preferentially engage right versus left brain hemispheres, respectively, thus predicting left-versus rightward behavioral biases. Our "brain's asymmetric frequency tuning" hypothesis explains the perceptual origin of horizontal SNAs for nonsymbolic visual numerosities and might be extensible to the auditory domain. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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