In this series of studies, we aim to investigate whether professional mathematicians differ from matched controls (education level, age, gender, and fluid intelligence) in how they automatically process numerical information.
Earlier studies (Cipora et al., 2016; Hohol et al., 2020; Meier et al., 2021) have shown that when it comes to elementary number processing, there are no qualitative differences between these groups (with an exception for the SNARC effect in the parity judgment task). However, most earlier studies focused on tasks in which participants were to process the semantics of presented numerical stimuli intentionally. Some of these studies have also shown that the processing of one aspect of numerical information (e.g., parity) may automatically trigger the processing of other aspects (e.g., magnitude), which is the case for the SNARC effect in the parity judgment task (Cipora et al., 2020, for a theoretical model).
Preregistration is available at Open Science Framework
Study status: preparation for data collection
