Spatial representations of numbers and letters in children. 2013

Jan Lonnemann, and Janosch Linkersdörfer, and Telse Nagler, and Marcus Hasselhorn, and Sven Lindberg
Department of Education and Human Development, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF) Frankfurt am Main, Germany ; Center for Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IDeA) Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

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.

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