Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When individuals provide magnitude estimates using numeric scales, they may be influenced by spatio-numeric biases.In Western, English-speaking cultures smaller magnitudes are associated with the left side of space and larger with theright. We demonstrated the impact of spatial-numeric associations on judgments of causal strength in two trial-by-trialcausal learning experiments. Causes appeared on either the left or right side of a computer screen. In Experiment 1,participants made casual judgments using a number line either increasing in magnitude from left to right or decreasingin magnitude from left to right. In Experiment 2, participants made judgments using a non-linear circular target with thedepth of hue saturation representing causal strength. In Experiment 1, participants gave higher causal ratings to causesappearing in the space associated with larger numbers on the number line. These influences disappeared when the linearityof spatial-numeric associations was removed in Experiment 2.