Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The SNARC effect is demonstrated in number judgment tasks when subjects are faster to respond to higher values withresponses made on the right and to lower values with responses made on the left. This effect has been found to beimpervious to handedness but works best for single digit values. Researchers speculate the reason for this robust effectto be a Mental Number Line (MNL) from which numbers, proceeding from 0-9 are oriented in a horizontal fashion fromleft to right. This follows when people consistently use text that proceeds from left to right, but for 1 or 2 billion ofpeople worldwide, text orientation proceeds right to left or top to bottom. The current experiments investigated whetherthe SNARC effect would be found among Egyptian Arabic-English biliterates who are highly proficient in both languagesand for whom reading and writing proceed from right-to-left, except for the numbering system. To our knowledge we havefound the first ever demonstration of the typical SNARC effect among this population.