Random movements generation in western and eastern cultures

Abstract

Recent investigations document a space number association effect in decisional processes of left-to-right reading cultures. Here, we expanded on this issue by studying motor decisional processes in a group of bilingual Iranians (i.e., which read text from right to left and numbers from left to right) and a group of monolingual Australians, submitted to four different numerical cues (i.e., digits written in Arabic, digits written in East Arabic, English number words, Farsi number words). According to previous evidence, we found that both Arabic digits and English number words affect the performance of the Australian participants; on the contrary, no effect has been reported for all four codes in the performance of the Iranian participants. The current findings are discussed according to the absence of a consistence in the reading direction between numbers and words (i.e., Iranian participants) as well as the specific Inter Stimulus Interval (ISI) adopted for displaying all four codes.