A growing body of research has shown that symbolic number processing relates to individual differences in mathematics. However, it remains unclear which mechanisms of symbolic number processing are crucial--accessing underlying magnitude representation of symbols (i.e., symbol-magnitude associations), processing relative order of symbols (i.e.,…

Mathematical cognition research has largely emphasized concepts that can be directly perceived or grounded in visuospatial referents. These include concrete number systems like natural numbers, integers, and rational numbers. Here, we investigate how a more abstract number system, the irrationals denoted by radical expressions like the square root…

Previous work has investigated adults' knowledge of principles for arithmetic with positive numbers (Dixon, Deets, & Bangert, 2001). The current study extends this past work to address adults' knowledge of principles of arithmetic with a negative number, and also investigates links between knowledge of principles and problem representation.…