To date, researchers investigating nonsymbolic number processes devoted little attention to the visual properties of their stimuli. This is unexpected, as nonsymbolic number is defined by its visual characteristics. When number changes, its visual properties change accordingly. In this study, we investigated the influence of different visual…

Individual differences in inhibitory control have been shown to relate to general mathematics achievement, but whether this relation varies for specific areas within mathematics is a question that remains open. Here, we evaluate if inhibitory processes play a specific role in the particular case of fraction comparison, where learners must ignore…

In quantity discrimination tasks, adults, infants and animals have been sometimes observed to process number only after all continuous variables, such as area or density, have been controlled for. This has been taken as evidence that processing number may be more cognitively demanding than processing continuous variables. We tested this hypothesis…

Lim and Leek (2012) presented a formalization of information along object contours, which they argued was an alternative to the approach taken in our article (Feldman & Singh, 2005). Here, we summarize the 2 approaches, showing that--notwithstanding Lim and Leek's (2012) critical rhetoric--their approach is substantially identical to ours,…

Previous evidence has shown that 11-month-olds represent ordinal relations between purely numerical values, whereas younger infants require a confluence of numerical and non-numerical cues. In this study, we show that when multiple featural cues (i.e., color and shape) are provided, 7-month-olds detect reversals in the ordinal direction of…

Evidence is presented for 2 modes of attention operating in simultanagnosia. The authors examined visual enumeration in a patient, GK, who has severe impairments in serially scanning across a scene and is unable to count the numbers of items in visual displays. However, GK's ability to judge the relative magnitude of 2 displays was consistently…

Left-right keypresses to numerals are faster for pairings of small numbers to left response and large numbers to right response than for the opposite pairings. This spatial numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect has been attributed to numbers being represented on a mental number line. We examined this issue in 3 experiments using a…

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his…

Are abstract representations of number--representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated--a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a…

This study examined the hypothesis of superior quantification abilities of persons with high functioning autism (HFA). Fourteen HFA individuals (mean age: 15 years) individually matched with 14 typically developing (TD) participants (gender, chronological age, full-scale IQ) were asked to quantify as accurately and quickly as possible…