Spatial representations of numbers and letters in children

Abstract

Different lines of evidence suggest that children's mental representations of numbers are spatially organized in form of a mental number line. It is, however, still unclear whether a spatial organization is specific for the numerical domain or also applies to other ordinal sequences in children. In the present study, children (n = 129) aged 8–9 years were asked to indicate the midpoint of lines flanked by task-irrelevant digits or letters. We found that the localization of the midpoint was systematically biased toward the larger digit. A similar, but less pronounced, effect was detected for letters with spatial biases toward the letter succeeding in the alphabet. Instead of assuming domain-specific forms of spatial representations, we suggest that ordinal information expressing relations between different items of a sequence might be spatially coded in children, whereby numbers seem to convey this kind of information in the most salient way.

Executive Function, Working Memory, and Verbal Fluency in Relation to Non-Verbal Intelligence in Greek-Speaking School-Age Children with Developmental Language Disorder

“…To measure the ability to resist interference from distractors, namely from information in the environment that is not relevant to the task at hand (see Friedman and Miyake [ 11 ]), we used the Eriksen Flanker task [ 121 ], as adapted for use with school-age children for the wider project that this study stems from (see design; [ 122 ]; the task was also used in [ 123 ]). Flanker-task versions have been used widely with TD children [ 114 , 124 , 125 , 126 , 127 ] as well as children with disorders or learning disabilities [ 128 , 129 , 130 ]. The task was developed and administered in E-Prime 2.0 software [ 131 ].…”

Mechanism of the SNARC Effect in Numerical Magnitude, Time Sequence, and Spatial Sequence Tasks: Involvement of LTM and WM

“…Although the LTM-dependent MNL plays an important role in the origination of the SNARC effect, recent studies have indicated that the serial order in WM could also activate the SNARC effect ( Fischer et al, 2010 ; Treccani and Umiltà, 2011 ; Lonnemann et al, 2013 ; van Dijck et al, 2013 ; Ginsburg and Gevers, 2015 ; Huber et al, 2016 ; Ginsburg et al, 2017 ). For example, in one study, five self-paced successive numbers that ranged from 1 to 10 were centrally and randomly presented on the screen in the learning section.…”

Brain Science and Geographic Thinking: A Review and Research Agenda for K-3 Geography

“…The curricular links go far beyond this simple notion of symbolic representation, however, because there is considerable evidence that children use spatial cues to help form and organize their mental representations of both letters and numbers [99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109].…”