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),…

Children learn the cardinalities of the first numbers one, two, three and four before they learn how counting tracks cardinality for all numbers. It may be that when children start to understand counting, they also discover how numbers relate to one another in a structured number system. Do children who understand that the cardinality of a set is…

The number line estimation task is frequently used to measure children's numerical magnitude understanding. It is unclear whether the resulting straight, horizontal, left-to-right-oriented estimate patterns indicate task constraints or children's intuitive number--space mapping. Three- to six-year-old children (N = 72, M[subscript age] = 4.89, 56%…

Number-recognition tasks, such as the how-many task, involve set-to-word mapping, and number-creation tasks, such as the give-n task, entail word-to-set mapping. The present study involved comparing sixty 3-year-olds' performance on the two tasks with collections of one to three items over three time points about 3 weeks apart. Inconsistent with…

Background: Early numeracy skills are associated with academic and life-long outcomes. Children from low-income backgrounds typically have poorer maths outcomes, and their learning can already be disadvantaged before they begin formal schooling. Understanding the relationship between the skills that support the acquisition of early maths skills…

The processing of ordinally organized information is a characteristic of both serial-order working memory and numerical cognition. Serial positions of items presented within a list follow an ordinal organization when stored in working memory, whereas numbers are based on an ordinal structure stored in long-term memory. We tested the hypothesis…

This study aimed to reveal the solutions of pre-service teachers to contextual problems related to number bases other than the base ten. Furthermore, it was intended to investigate which issues pre-service teachers discussed about their learning in the problem-solving process, including context, and about student learning in their future teaching…

This study explored whether kindergarteners who had yet to learn about multi-digit numbers at school could automatically process the underlying magnitudes, i.e., place-values, represented by the digits in a multi-digit number. A place-value Stroop task showed a pair of price tags in each trial. Each price tag contained a three-digit number, of…

Young children are sensitive to both numerical and spatial magnitude cues early in development, but many questions remain about how children's attention to magnitudes relates to their early math achievement. In two studies, we tested three hypotheses related to the flexible attention to magnitudes (FAM) account, which suggests that young…

People frequently encounter numeric information in medical and health contexts. In this paper, we investigated the math factors that are associated with decision-making accuracy in health and non-health contexts. This is an important endeavor given that there is relatively little cross-talk between math cognition researchers and those studying…

The study focuses on the effect of the lexical-syntactic structure on the patterns of errors by Arab first graders in tasks involving reading two-digit number and writing two-digit numbers to dictation. Children made few change or omission errors, indicating that they had little problem with the lexical aspects of the counting system. However,…

This article offers reflections on task design in the context of a Grade R (reception year) in-service numeracy project in South Africa. The research explores under what conditions, and for what learning purpose, a task designed by someone else may be recast and how varying given task specifications may support or inhibit learning, as a result of…

Do children spontaneously represent spatial-numeric features of a task, even when it does not include printed numbers (Mix et al., 2016)? Sixty first grade students completed a novel spatial estimation task by seeking and finding pages in a 100-page book without printed page numbers. Children were shown pages 1 through 6 and 100, and then were…

The move from additive to multiplicative thinking requires significant change in children's comprehension and manipulation of numerical relationships, involves various conceptual components, and can be a slow, multistage process for some. Unit arrays are a key visuospatial representation for supporting learning, but most research focuses on 2D…