TY - JOUR PY - 2007// TI - Nonverbal representation of time and number in adults JO - Acta psychologica A1 - Roitman, Jamie D. A1 - Brannon, Elizabeth M. A1 - Andrews, Jessica R. A1 - Platt, Michael L. SP - 296 EP - 318 VL - 124 IS - 3 N2 - A wealth of human and animal research supports common neural processing of numerical and temporal information. Here we test whether adult humans spontaneously encode number and time in a paradigm similar to those previously used to test the mode-control model in animals. Subjects were trained to classify visual stimuli that varied in both number and duration as few/short or many/long. Subsequently subjects were tested with novel stimuli that varied time and held number constant (eight flashes in 0.8-3.2s) or varied number and held time constant (4-16 flashes in 1.6s). Adult humans classified novel stimuli as many/long as monotonic functions of both number and duration, consistent with simultaneous, nonverbal, analog encoding. Numerical sensitivity, however, was finer than temporal sensitivity, suggesting differential salience of time and number. These results support the notion that adults simultaneously represent the number and duration of stimuli but suggest a possible asymmetry in their representations.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 0001-6918 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2006.03.008 ID - ref1 ER -