During the preschool years, children are simultaneously undergoing a reshaping of their mental number line and becoming increasingly sensitive to the social norms expressed by those around them. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old American and Israeli children were given a task in which an experimenter laid out chips with numbers (1-5),…

This study investigates how the approximate number system (ANS) and young children's symbolic skills jointly develop and interact. Specifically, the study aims at disentangling the directionality of the association between ANS acuity and a wide range of symbolic skills that reflect 4- to 5-year-olds' symbolic quantitative knowledge (enumeration…

Children's arithmetic performance is dependent on the arithmetic task format, but little is known about how domain-specific and domain-general abilities contribute to solving diverse arithmetic problems. In this study, 145 Italian typically developing children between the ages of five and six, who have not yet received formal schooling, were…

Previous studies have suggested that there is a left-to-right mental number line, which is based on individuals responding faster when a smaller magnitude is presented on the left visual field and a larger magnitude is presented on the right visual field. This study examined whether the Spatial-Numerical Associations could influence individuals'…

Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

A growing body of research suggests that children's understanding of mathematical language is critical for their mathematical abilities. Most of this work has been restricted to single language learners (i.e., SLLs), and used dual language learners (i.e., DLLs) as an exclusion criterion, raising questions about the generalizability of these…

Urban and rural children have different levels of performance in arithmetic processing. This study investigated whether such a residence difference can be explained by phonological processing. A total of 1,501 Chinese primary school students from urban and rural areas were recruited to complete nine cognitive tasks: two in arithmetic performance…

From a perceptual learning perspective, infants use social information (like gaze direction) in a similar way as other information in our physical environment (like object movements) to specify action possibilities. In the current study, we assumed that infants are able to learn an affordance upon observing an adult failing to act out that…

Standard Australian reading assessment tests are criticized for being culturally inappropriate for use with Australian Indigenous children, particularly for those living in remote and very remote regions, as these tests are culturally biased towards mainstream Australian culture and imperceptive to Indigenous knowledge, language, concepts, and…

The aim of this study is to investigate whether maternal spatial support during two types of joint manipulative toy play tasks with 2-year-old children was longitudinally associated with math screening test scores in second grade. The interaction between spatial support and maternal education was explored as well. We also investigated predictions…

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by a complex maturation process of various cognitive abilities. Cognitive control, which includes response inhibition and working memory, is one of them. A typical study on response inhibition to visual stimuli presents distractors and targets on the same display (e.g., the computer screen).…

Over three decades of research has shown that spatial reasoning and mathematics performance are highly correlated. Spatial visualization, in particular, has been found to predict mathematics performance in primary and middle school children. This research sought to determine the effectiveness of a spatial visualization intervention program on…

It is usually accepted that the binding of what, where, and when is a central component of young children's and animals' nonconceptual episodic abilities. We argue that additionally binding self-in-past (what-where-when-"who") adds a crucial conceptual requirement, and we ask when it becomes possible and what its cognitive correlates…

Previous research into face processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has revealed atypical biases toward particular facial information during identity recognition. Specifically, a focus on features (or high spatial frequencies [HSFs]) has been reported for both face and nonface processing in ASD. The current study investigated the development…

This study investigated longitudinal pathways leading from early spatial skills in first-grade girls to their fifth-grade analytical math reasoning abilities (N = 138). First-grade assessments included spatial skills, verbal skills, addition/subtraction skills, and frequency of choice of a decomposition or retrieval strategy on the…