Abstract

Coins are used for everyday economic exchanges. The present work examines the relation between the size and monetary value of coins within large coin sets. European participants were asked to decide whether the monetary sum of a set of euro coins was smaller/larger than a given reference value. The results showed that this monetary value judgment was improved when the semantic information of the coins was congruent with their visual size in the real world, compared with judgments based on incongruent (uniform or inverted) information. Distinguishing between units (€0.01, €0.02, €0.05), tens (€0.1, €0.2, €0.5) and mixed categories, we further found that the size congruency effect depended on stimulus characteristics. The positive correlation between coin size and value, leading to improved monetary judgments, supports the existence of a sensory integration of the monetary and physical properties of coins.