Attentional SNARC : There ’ s something special about numbers ( let us count the ways ) q

0010-0277/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier B.V doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.04.006 q This research was supported by a Killam post-doc Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council ( fellowship to M. Dodd and NSERC grant to A. Kingsto thank Wieske van Zoest, Ipek Oruc, Sharon Mo MacIsaac, and two anonymus reviewers for their ins of this project. We would also like to thank Kristin D collecting the data. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 402 472 0547. E-mail address: [email protected] (M.D. D We report a study that examines whether the presentation of irrelevant, ordinal information at central fixation interacts with the allocation of attention beyond fixation. Previous research has demonstrated that number perception influences the allocation of spatial attention, such that the presentation of a spatially nonpredictive number at fixation results in attention being allocated to the left when the central number is low (e.g., 1), and attention being allocated to the right when the central number is high (e.g., 9). Here, we examine whether this attentional SNARC effect (spatial numerical association of response codes) generalizes to other ordinal sequences: letters, days, and months. Though we replicate the attentional SNARC we find that this effect is number-specific, unless participants are required to process the cue in an order-relevant fashion. This discovery of number-specificity has important implications both for the functional separation between SNARC and attention-SNARC effects, as well as lending support to recent theories regarding the specificity of a shared neural architecture between numbers and visuospatial attention. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.