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Developmental differences in approaches to nonsymbolic comparison tasks

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posted on 2018-01-05, 09:47 authored by Sarah Clayton, Matthew InglisMatthew Inglis, Camilla GilmoreCamilla Gilmore
Nonsymbolic comparison tasks are widely used to measure children’s and adults’ Approximate Number System (ANS) acuity. Recent evidence has demonstrated that task performance can be influenced by changes to the visual characteristics of the stimuli, leading some researchers to suggest it is unlikely that an ANS exists that can extract number information independently of the visual characteristics of the arrays. Here we analysed 124 children’s and 120 adults’ dot comparison accuracy scores from three separate studies to investigate individual and developmental differences in how numerical and visual information contribute to nonsymbolic numerosity judgements. We found that, in contrast to adults, the majority of children did not use numerical information over and above visual cue information to compare quantities. This finding was consistent across different studies. The results have implications for research on the relationship between dot comparison performance and formal mathematics achievement. Specifically, if most children’s performance on dot comparison tasks can be accounted for without the involvement of numerical information, it seems unlikely that observed correlations with mathematics achievement stem from ANS acuity alone.

Funding

This research was supported by a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (C.G.), and a Royal Society Worshipful Company of Actuaries Research Fellowship (M.I.).

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Citation

CLAYTON, S., INGLIS, M. and GILMORE, C.K., 2018. Developmental differences in approaches to nonsymbolic comparison tasks. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72 (3), pp.436-445.

Publisher

SAGE Publications © Experimental Psychology Society

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-12-18

Publication date

2018-02-08

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021818755296.

ISSN

1747-0218

Language

  • en

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