The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Previous work on the direct Speed–Intensity Association (SIA) on comparative judgment
tasks involved spatially distributed responses over spatially distributed stimuli with high
motivational significance like facial expressions of emotions. This raises the possibility that
the inferred stimulus-driven regulation of lateralized motor reactivity described by SIA,
which was against the one expected on the basis of a valence-specific lateral bias, was
entirely due to attentional capture from motivational significance (beyond numerical
cognition). In order to establish the relevance of numerical cognition on the regulation of
attentional capture we ran two complementary experiments. These involved the same direct
comparison task on stimulus pairs that were fully comparable in terms of their analog
representation of intensity but with different representational domain and motivational
significance: symbolic magnitudes with low motivational significance in experiment 1 vs.
emotions with rather high motivational significance in experiment 2. The results reveal a
general SIA and point to a general mechanism regulating comparative judgments. This is
based on the way spatial attention is captured toward locations that contain the stimulus
which is closest in term of relative intensity to the extremal values of the series, regardless
from its representational domain being it symbolic or emotiona
