Journal
BRAIN AND COGNITION
Volume 77, Issue 2, Pages 315-323Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.07.002
Keywords
Magnitude; Spatial organization; Number; Emotion; Abstract concepts; Parietal cortex
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Funding
- William Orr Dingwall Foundation
- John Merck Fund
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Converging behavioral and neural evidence suggests that numerical representations are mentally organized in left-to-right orientation. Here we show that this format of spatial organization extends to emotional expression. In Experiment 1, right-side responses became increasingly faster as number (represented by Arabic numerals) or happiness (depicted in facial stimuli) increased, for judgments completely unrelated to magnitude. Additional experiments suggest that magnitude (i.e., more/less relations), not valence (i.e., positive/negative), underlies left-to-right orientation of emotional expression (Experiment 2), and that this orientation accommodates to the context-relevant emotion (e.g., happier faces are more rightward when judged on happiness, but more leftward when judged on angriness; Experiment 3). These findings show that people automatically extract magnitude from a variety of stimuli, representing such information in common left-to-right format, perhaps reflecting a mental magnitude line. We suggest that number is but one dimension in a hyper-general representational system uniting disparate dimensions of magnitude and likely subserved by common neural mechanisms in posterior parietal cortex. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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