A Mechanistic Study of the Association Between Symbolic Approximate Arithmetic Performance and Basic Number Magnitude Processing Based on Task Difficulty

Wei, Wei; Deng, Wanying; Chen, Chen; He, Jie; Qin, Jike and Kovas, Yulia. 2018. A Mechanistic Study of the Association Between Symbolic Approximate Arithmetic Performance and Basic Number Magnitude Processing Based on Task Difficulty. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(1551), [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Two types of number magnitude processing – semantic and spatial – are significantly correlated with children’s arithmetic performance. However, it remains unclear whether these abilities are independent predictors of symbolic approximate arithmetic performance. The current study addressed this question by assessing 86 kindergartners (mean age of 5 years and 7 months) on semantic number processing (number comparison task), spatial number processing (number line estimation task), and symbolic approximate arithmetic performance with different levels of difficulty. The results showed that performance on both tasks of number magnitude processing was significantly correlated with symbolic approximate arithmetic performance, but the strength of these correlations was moderated by the difficulty level of the arithmetic task. The simple symbolic approximate arithmetic task was equally related to both tasks. In contrast, for more difficult symbolic approximate arithmetic tasks, the contribution of number comparison ability was smaller than that of the number line estimation ability. These results indicate that the strength of contribution of the different types of numerical processing depends on the difficulty of the symbolic approximate arithmetic task.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01551

Keywords:

symbolic approximate arithmetic, kindergartner, number processing, number line estimation, number comparison, task difficulty

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates:

DateEvent
6 August 2018Accepted
11 September 2018Published Online

Item ID:

25861

Date Deposited:

21 Feb 2019 10:35

Last Modified:

09 Jun 2021 19:11

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/25861

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