From Innate Spatial Biases to Enculturated Spatial Cognition: The Case of Spatial Associations in Number and Other Sequences

Frontiers in Psychology

Koleen McCrink¹ 

关键词: space;    number;    neonates;    laterality;    toddlerhood;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00415

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Humans, as well as other animals, use space to organize the world. This use of space as an organizational scaffold is especially prevalent when we conceptualize mathematics, a domain that shares behavioral and neural overlap with the domain of space (Pinel et al., 2004; Kaufmann et al., 2005; Dehaene and Brannon, 2010). One of the most prominent descriptions of this relation is that of a mental number line, in which small values are associated with the left side of space, and large values with the right (Moyer and Landauer, 1967; Dehaene et al., 1993). The development of the mature form of this mental number line is multiply determined, with evidence pointing to evolutionary pressures as well as cultural and linguistic influences. This cognitive bias to associate numerical information with space, and do so with left-right or right-left asymmetry, is adaptive; it helps to bolster memory and learning throughout our lives (Opfer and Furlong, 2011; McCrink and Galamba, 2015; McCrink and Shaki, 2016; Bulf et al., 2017). Moreover, with development this bias to map number onto an oriented continuum extends to any well-ordered information, even when recently learned (Gevers et al., 2003, 2004; Previtali et al., 2010). Critically, despite the apparent promise of using space as a scaffold for learning and memory, there are several gaps in the literature surrounding an essential period of the development of spatial-numerical associations: toddlerhood and early childhood. Here, we summarize current work on the innate and culture-specific factors modulating the mental number line in infancy and childhood, and note further research that could help to shed light on a complete developmental picture of this phenomenon.

【 授权许可】

CC BY