Rethinking the roles of language and task for spatial-numerical associations: Commentary on Hochman et al. (2025).

Comments on the original article by Hochman et al. (see record 2025-49981-001) regarding cross-cultural study of the spatial-numerical association of response codes effect. Hochman et al. (2025) investigated how reading direction influences the spatial representation of numbers, known as spatial-numerical associations (SNAs). They compared SNAs between 50 left-to-right reading British and 55 right-to-left reading Iranian adults. The authors manipulated the task (parity and magnitude classification) and stimulus modality (auditory and visual numbers) and found similar SNAs across groups and conditions. Our commentary suggests that some of the choices around participant assessment and task selection may have limited the strength of their findings. We suggest more sensitive methods for future research and offer a broader contextualization of cross-cultural research into SNAs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).