ArticleFrontiers in psychology2015
Spatial biases during mental arithmetic: evidence from eye movements on a blank screen.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Spatial attention in mental arithmetic: A literature review and meta-analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Pooled it
- Looking into the Calculating Mind: Evidence About Arithmetic from Eye-Tracking Studies.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Vertical shifts of visuospatial attention, not (eye) movements, affect auditory pitch discrimination.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Spatial coding of arithmetic operations in early learning: an eye tracking study in first-grade elementary school children.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Eye tracking study in children to assess mental calculation and eye movements.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Spontaneous eye movements reflect the representational geometries of conceptual spaces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A Review of Studies Supporting Metaphorical Embodiment.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- A functional role for oculomotor preparation in mental arithmetic evidenced by the abducted eye paradigm.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Article
- The predictive role of eye movements in mental arithmetic.Experimental brain research · 2022Article
- Assessing orienting of attention to understand the time course of mental calculation.Cognitive processing · 2020Article
- Semantic associations between arithmetic and space: Evidence from temporal order judgements.Memory & cognition · 2020Article
- How does number magnitude influence temporal and spatial parameters of eye movements?Experimental brain research · 2020Article
- Decoding the processing stages of mental arithmetic with magnetoencephalography.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2019Article
- Spatial grounding of symbolic arithmetic: an investigation with optokinetic stimulation.Psychological research · 2019Article
- Number concepts: abstract and embodied.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Addition and Subtraction but Not Multiplication and Division Cause Shifts of Spatial Attention.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2018Article
- Clock Walking and Gender: How Circular Movements Influence Arithmetic Calculations.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Impact of optokinetic stimulation on mental arithmetic.Psychological research · 2017Article
- The Time Course of Spatial Attention Shifts in Elementary Arithmetic.Scientific reports · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While the influence of spatial-numerical associations in number categorization tasks has been well established, their role in mental arithmetic is less clear. It has been hypothesized that mental addition leads to rightward and upward shifts of spatial attention (along the "mental number line"), whereas subtraction leads to leftward and downward shifts. We addressed this hypothesis by analyzing spontaneous eye movements during mental arithmetic. Participants solved verbally presented arithmetic problems (e.g., 2 + 7, 8-3) aloud while looking at a blank screen. We found that eye movements reflected spatial biases in the ongoing mental operation: Gaze position shifted more upward when participants solved addition compared to subtraction problems, and the horizontal gaze position was partly determined by the magnitude of the operands. Interestingly, the difference between addition and subtraction trials was driven by the operator (plus vs. minus) but was not influenced by the computational process. Thus, our results do not support the idea of a mental movement toward the solution during arithmetic but indicate a semantic association between operation and space.
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