Numerical cognition
Do small numbers pull young children's movements to the left?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Preschoolers who had not yet learned formal maths veered further left and moved more efficiently after seeing a small number of dots, suggesting the left-to-right number line exists before schooling.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject kinematic experiment: each child made identical finger 'kicks' toward a goal after a baseline picture or after 2-dot or 8-dot arrays (5 dots = no-go), with movements recorded by 3-D motion capture; preschool and school-age subgroups compared
- N
- N=21 · 21 right-handed children from preschool to late primary-school age, split for exploratory comparison into a small preschool group without formal maths teaching and a larger school-age group
- Population
- Italian preschool and primary-school children
- Outcome
- Finger trajectory kinematics, especially maximum leftward deviation, maximum trajectory height and peak velocity, compared across stimulus conditions and age groups
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Key findings
Preschoolers' kicks deviated further to the left after seeing two dots than after the baseline picture, fitting the idea that small numbers are mentally placed on the left. Preschoolers also made lower, more efficient trajectories after two dots, whereas eight dots did not differ from two dots on these measures. School-age children showed no reliable number effects on their trajectories, and within that group maths ability did not moderate the results. Across both groups, peak velocity was slightly lower after two dots than at baseline.
Methodology
Children wore a tiny soccer shoe on their right index finger and flicked a small ball toward a goal after each picture on a screen. The picture was either a drawing of a goal (baseline), two dots, or eight dots; five dots meant 'do not kick', which forced the children to actually process how many dots they saw. Because the kick was the same in every trial, any change in the finger's path could be attributed to the number seen. A 3-D motion-capture system tracked the finger, and preschoolers without formal maths teaching were compared with school-age children.
Limitations
The sample was very small with a gender imbalance, and the preschool subgroup was only a handful of children, so the age comparison is exploratory. The baseline was a picture of a goal rather than a matched non-numerical array, and the dot arrays were not controlled for total area, so the effects might reflect visual properties that go along with numerosity rather than number itself. The study was not designed to tell whether small sets are handled by subitizing or by the approximate number system, and maths ability could only be measured in the older children. Some models fitted the data poorly and explained little variance, so modest effects should be generalised cautiously.
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