ArticlePsychological research2021
Is 'heavy' up or down? Testing the vertical spatial representation of weight.
Article in Psychological research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Changing speed along the mental line: A SNARC-like effect for visual acceleration.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Spatial response-code association for loudness but not brightness.Perception · 2025Article
- A SNARC-like effect for visual speed.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Comparing the ability of the IAT and of the SC-IAT to account for behavioral outcomes: a re-analysis using linear mixed-effects models.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Analogue magnitude representation of angles and its relation to geometric expertise.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- It's SNARC o' clock: manipulating the salience of the context in a conceptual replication of Bächtold et al.'s (1998) clockface study.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Contrasting symbolic and non-symbolic numerical representations in a joint classification task.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- When time stands upright: STEARC effects along the vertical axis.Psychological research · 2023Article
- A systematic investigation reveals that Ishihara et al.'s (2008) STEARC effect only emerges when time is directly assessed.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Neuromuscular Diseases Affect Number Representation and Processing: An Exploratory Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Smaller numbers are typically responded to faster with a bottom than a top key, whereas the opposite occurs for larger numbers (a vertical spatial-numerical association of response codes: i.e. the vertical SNARC effect). Here, in four experiments, we explored whether a vertical spatial-magnitude association can emerge for lighter vs. heavier items. Participants were presented with a central target stimulus that could be a word describing a material (e.g. 'paper', 'iron': Experiment 1), a numerical quantity of weight (e.g. '1 g', '1 kg': Experiment 2) or a picture associated with a real object that participants weighed before the experiment (Experiments 3a/3b). Participants were asked to respond either to the weight (Experiments 1-3a) or to the size (i.e. weight was task-irrelevant; Experiment 3b) of the stimuli by pressing vertically placed keys. In Experiments 1 and 2, faster responses emerged for the lighter-bottom/heavier-top mapping-in line with a standard SNARC-like effect-whereas in Experiment 3a the opposite mapping emerged (lighter-top/heavier-bottom). No evidence of an implicit weight-space association emerged in Experiment 3b. Overall, these results provide evidence indicating a possible context-dependent vertical spatial representation of weight.
Indexed as
Identifiers
32170400What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.