Magnitude information, for instance, regarding weight, distance, or velocity, is crucial for planning goal-directed interactions. Accordingly, magnitude information, including numerical magnitude, can affect actions: Responses to small numbers are faster with the left hand than the right and vice versa (hand-based SNARC effect). Previous…

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),…

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…

Children's spontaneous focusing on Arabic number symbols (SFONS) has been identified as a relevant component of their early mathematical development. This study investigated whether SFONS is a separate construct from spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) and examined whether it is uniquely related to numerical abilities and mathematics…

Metacognitive monitoring, recognizing when one is accurate or not, is important because judgments of one's performance or knowledge often relate to control decisions, such as help seeking. Unfortunately, children and adults struggle to accurately monitor their performance during number-magnitude estimation. People's accuracy in estimating number…

How do children construct a concept of natural numbers? Past research addressing this question has mainly focused on understanding how children come to acquire the cardinality principle. However, at that point children already understand the first number words and have a rudimentary natural number concept in place. The question therefore remains;…

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…

Children's spontaneous focusing on Arabic number symbols (SFONS) has been identified as a relevant component of their early mathematical development. This study investigated whether SFONS is a separate construct from spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) and examined whether it is uniquely related to numerical abilities and mathematics…

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., "committee," "team"), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they…

This study examined the effects of training involving spatial versus nonspatial representations of numerical magnitude for promoting arithmetic fluency. The key goal was to advance theoretical understanding of the relation between spatial and math learning, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the development of future educational…

Previous research has investigated the Spatial Numerical Associations of Response Codes (SNARC) effect as a measure of spatial number coding in relation to mathematics (Cipora et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14355). An issue that arises if one wants to correlate mathematical performance with the SNARC effect, is how individual…

Humans represent numbers on a mental number line with smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right side. A left-to-right oriented spatial-numerical association, (SNA), has been demonstrated in animals and infants. However, the possibility that SNA is learnt by early exposure to caregivers' directional biases is still open. We…

Recent research in numerical cognition has begun to systematically detail the ability of humans and nonhuman animals to perceive the magnitudes of nonsymbolic ratios. These relationally defined analogs to rational numbers offer new potential insights into the nature of human numerical processing. However, research into their similarities with and…

While symbolic number processing is an important correlate for typical and low mathematics achievement, it remains to be determined whether children with high mathematics achievement also have excellent symbolic number processing abilities. We investigated this question in 64 children (aged 8 to 10), i.e., 32 children with persistent high…

Background: Children's numerical and arithmetic skills differ greatly already at an early age. Although research focusing on accounting for these large individual differences clearly demonstrates that mathematical performance draws upon several cognitive abilities, our knowledge concerning key abilities underlying mathematical skill development is…