Spatial representations of numbers and letters in children

Frontiers in Psychology

Jan Lonnemann¹ 

关键词: line bisection;    mental number line;    spatial representations;    ordinal representations;    cardinal representations;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00544

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY