The cost of errors: confusion analysis and the mental representation of familiar and unfamiliar digits

Abstract

People express quantities using a remarkably small set of units – digits. Confusing digits could be costly, and not all confusions are equal; confusing a price tag of 2 dollars with 9 dollars is naturally more costly than confusing 2 with 3. Confusion patterns are intimately related to the distances between mental representations, which are hypothetical internal symbols said to stand for, or represent, ‘real’ external stimuli. The distance between the mental representations of two digits could be determined by their numerical distance. Alternatively, it could be driven by visual similarity. In an English speaking cohort, we investigated the mental representations of familiar and unfamiliar n..