Biology subjects

Caparos, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Caparos, S..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

A left-to-right bias in spatial numerical associations with dots and symbols

Number and space are intertwined in human and non-human cognition. A substantial body of research has shown that numerical magnitudes are mentally represented along a spatially oriented continuum, akin to a "mental number line". Some suggested that its directionality is determined by culture and context, an idea that was recently challenged by a study that showed that an implicit association between "left" and "small" emerges not only in literate adults, but also in unschooled indigenous adult populations and preschool Western children. This finding suggests that SNAs may originate from universal innate mechanisms rather than being solely a by-product of cultural learning. However, while the study reported a strong association between "left" and "decreasing" numerosity, there was only a very weak association between "right" and "increasing" numerosity. This asymmetry was not predicted and needs further investigation to be understood. Here, we investigated the number/space association in implicit tasks in educated Western adults in greater depth by using more variable and better-controlled stimuli compared to the ones used in the previous study, and also manipulating stimulus format, using both dot patterns and symbolic numbers. Fifty-one adult participants performed a numerical comparison task within a Go-No-Go paradigm on subsequent pairs of visual stimuli (with ratios spanning from 0.75 to 0.94) that could appear on the left or on the right of a fixation point and completed two different tasks: "press when more" and "press when less". Results revealed distinct response patterns depending on the symbolic/non-symbolic nature of the stimuli. When non-symbolic stimuli were used, a consistent association between small numerosities and the left side and large numerosities and the right side was observed. When symbolic stimuli were used, only an association between large numerosities and the right side was observed. These findings support the hypothesis that SNAs may reflect a biological predisposition associated with brain asymmetry and that task demands may interact with the underlying hemispheric specialisations.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

Data plots are widely used in science, journalism and politics, since they efficiently allow to depict a large amount of information. Graphicacy, the ability to understand graphs, thus became a fundamental cultural skill. Here, we introduce a new measure of graphicacy that assesses the ability to detect a trend in noisy scatterplots ("does this graph go up or down?"). In 3943 educated participants, responses vary as a sigmoid function of the t-value that a statistician would compute to detect a significant trend. We find a minimum level of core graphicacy even in unschooled participants living in remote Namibian villages (N=87) and 6-year-old 1st-graders who never read a graph (N=27). However, the sigmoid slope (the "graphicacy index") varies across participants, increases with education, and tightly correlates with statistical knowledge, showing that experience contributes to refining graphical intuitions. Our tool is publicly available online and allows to quickly evaluate intuitive graphics skills. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCEThe rising cost of gas, the number of Covid deaths, the evolution of temperatures during the summer months: we often face graphs depicting these phenomena. The scientific literature has shown that human adults can intuit, within milliseconds, the statistical trend of these graphs. However, we do not know if these intuitions generalized to unschooled people and, most importantly, how to measure their variations in the population. In this study we show that intuitive graphics skills are present even in 6-year-old children who never saw a graph and in the Himba of Namibia, an indigenous people with no access to formal schooling. Furthermore, we developed a quantitative assessment of such intuitive graphics skills (which we called the "graphicacy index"), that everyone can easily obtain for free, through a short (10 minutes) online test: https://neurospin-data.cea.fr/exp/lorenzo-ciccione/graphicacy-index/. In summary, our study provides the first attempt to formally quantify human intuitions of statistical graphs.

scientific communication and education↗