There is a renewed debate about whether educated adults solve simple addition problems (e.g., 2 + 3) by direct fact retrieval or by fast, automatic counting-based procedures. Recent research testing adults' simple addition and multiplication showed that a 150-ms preview of the operator (+ or ×) facilitated addition, but not multiplication,…

A focus of early mathematics education is to build fluency through practice. Several models of skill acquisition have sought to explain the increase in fluency because of practice by modeling both the learning mechanisms driving this speedup and the changes in cognitive processes involved in executing the skill (such as transitioning from…

A variety of experimental evidence indicates that the memory representation for multiplication facts (e.g., 6 [times] 9 = 54) incorporates bidirectional links with a forward association from factors to product and a reverse association from product to factors. Surprisingly, the authors did not find evidence in Experiment 1 of facilitative…