Is the SNARC a boojum?

Abstract

In this essay, the author notes that for the past half-century, psychologists have examined how humans make use of spatial representations when making judgments about numerical properties of sets of items. This line of work was initiated by Frank Restle (1970), who asked college students at Indiana University to choose the larger number, either the sum of A + B or C, as rapidly as possible. Restle found that the timing of people s choices fit an analog model of numerical judgment that had been proposed a few years earlier (Moyer & Landauer, 1967) and that people seemed to judge the magnitude of numbers by their position on a mental number line. The hypothetical number line is now called the mental number line, and the effect on latency to respond to questions about numbers that results from use of the mental number line has been labeled the Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes or SNARC for short. The author notes that she has parodied Frank Beach s (1950) title for his classic essay about the state of comparative psychology at the mid-20th century for the title of this piece. Beach, in turn, was inspired by Lewis Carroll s nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark, published in 1876. The poem chronicles the impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature, the snark. According to the poem, most species of snarks are relatively harmless. The boojum, however, is a dangerous snark, because those who catch sight of a boojum suddenly vanish away. Here, the author wants to turn the meaning of the homonym SNARC a bit to suggest that the SNARC might itself vanish, perhaps to metamorphose into a more complex entity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).