Rational numbers (i.e., fractions, percentages, decimals, and whole-number frequencies) are notoriously difficult mathematical constructs. Yet correctly interpreting rational numbers is imperative for understanding health statistics, such as gauging the likelihood of side effects from a medication. Several pernicious biases affect health…

Studies on children's understanding of counting examine when and how children acquire the cardinal principle: the idea that the last word in a counted set reflects the cardinal value of the set. Using Wynn's (1990) Give-N Task, researchers classify children who can count to generate large sets as having acquired the cardinal principle…

Mastery of mathematics depends on the people's ability to manipulate and abstract values such as negative numbers. Knowledge of arithmetic principles does not necessarily generalize from positive number arithmetic to arithmetic involving negative numbers (Prather & Alibali, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210701864147). In this study, we…

The propensity to use a spatial framework to organize other pieces of information is a widespread phenomenon that permeates humans' representation of diverse concepts, including numerical quantities. Developmental studies on numerical cognition have revealed that humans possess a system for abstract quantity representation that is functional at…

The aim of this article is to advise readers that natural numbers may be introduced as ordinal numbers or cardinal numbers and that there is an ongoing discussion about which come first. In addition, through several examples, the authors demonstrate that in the process of answering the question "How many?" one may, if convenient, use…

Children's ability to discriminate nonsymbolic number (e.g., the number of items in a set) is a commonly studied predictor of later math skills. Number discrimination improves throughout development, but what drives this improvement is unclear. Competing theories suggest that it may be due to a sharpening numerical representation or an improved…

One approach to understanding how the human cognitive system stores and operates with quantifiers such as "some," "many," and "all" is to investigate their interaction with the cognitive mechanisms for estimating and comparing quantities from perceptual input (i.e., nonsymbolic quantities). While a potential link…

Although difficulties processing both symbolic and nonsymbolic proportion compared with absolute number are well established, the mechanisms involved remain unclear. We investigate four potential explanations to account for better number processing in adulthood: (a) number is more salient than proportion, (b) number is encoded more automatically…

This study concerns the cognitive process of mathematical problem posing, conceptualized in three stages: understanding the task, constructing the problem, and expressing the problem. We used the eye tracker and think-aloud methods to deeply explore students' behavior in these three stages of problem posing, especially focusing on investigating…

Children's ability to discriminate nonsymbolic number (e.g. the number of items in a set) is a commonly studied predictor of later math skills. Number discrimination improves throughout development, but what drives this improvement is unclear. Competing theories suggest it may be due to a sharpening numerical representation or an improved ability…

Little is known about the mental representation of large multidigit numbers that are usually beyond our personal experience. The present study explored the processing mechanisms of these numbers in a series of experiments, using the numerical comparison task. Experiment 1 included within and between-scale comparisons of multidigit numbers varying…

This study reports the results of 4 experiments that addressed whether the domains of deictic time and number exert a cross-domain link. Such a link would be consistent with A Theory of Magnitude (i.e., ATOM). In contrast, no link between the two domains would support the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which assumes that each domain is only…

In the field of numerical cognition, researchers conventionally assess nonsymbolic numerical abilities with the help of number comparison tasks, in which participants need to compare two arrays. Many studies emphasized that visual (non-numerical) dimensions can serve as strategic cues and influence the decision on numerosity in these tasks. In…

Mathematical word problem-solving skills are crucial for students across their lives, yet solving such tasks poses challenges for many. Therefore, understanding the characteristics of mathematical word problems that are associated with students' performance is important. The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the…

Mathematical cognition requires coordinated activity across multiple brain regions, leading to the emergence of resting-state functional connectivity as a method for studying the neural basis of differences in mathematical achievement. Hyper-connectivity of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a key locus of mathematical and numerical processing, has…