Topic
Numerical cognition research, explained
20 open-access numerical cognition studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Does maths anxiety drain working memory in middle-schoolers?
Children with high maths anxiety did worse than calm peers on maths and on verbal memory tasks, but not on reading or writing.
- Do we compare digits and dot clouds with the same mental system?
A Weber's-law 'approximate number' model described how people compare dot clouds well, but it systematically mispredicted how they compare written digits, suggesting digits use a different system.
- Can seeing a small number nudge your hand to the left?
When people were free to flick a ball left or right after seeing a number, the small digit 2 made them choose the left goal more often than chance and also changed the timing of their movement.
- How Genetics and Dopamine Affect Math Skills in Children
Children with a gene variant that leads to higher dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex performed better on both symbolic and non-symbolic math tasks.
- Can We Do Number Research Online?
Online browser experiments can reliably measure fine differences in human reaction times for numerical processing tasks, replicating classic laboratory findings.
- Does the way your language says numbers change how you compare them?
German speakers, whose number words put units before tens, compared three-digit numbers in the same way as English speakers, suggesting that the language quirk that affects two-digit numbers does not carry over to three-digit numbers in adults.
- Does the brain code 'how many' with two channels or many?
After staring at 50-dot arrays, people saw smaller arrays as even fewer and larger arrays as even more numerous, a pattern that fits many number-tuned channels rather than two opposing ones.
- Does how you ask change how well people estimate dot numbers?
People badly underestimated how many dots they saw, yet judged the ratio between two dot sets almost perfectly.
- Does training children's number sense improve their maths?
Six weeks of number-sense games made children better at judging which dot set was bigger but did not improve their maths scores.
- Why do good maths students still trip over tricky word problems?
Even children who were good at maths made many errors when a word problem said 'less than' but actually required adding, and those with better reading comprehension were less affected.
- Why do women and men compare two-digit numbers differently?
Women were more thrown off than men when the tens and units digits of two numbers pointed in opposite directions, and this difference was explained by how people navigated, not by their hormone levels.
- How Walking in Circles Affects Math Performance
Walking clockwise helps people perform addition tasks more quickly, but this spatial boost to calculation speed is only seen in men.
- Does moving a finger help you say the number it counts?
Pressing a key with the finger you normally use to count a number made people slightly faster to read that number aloud, even though the task never linked fingers to numbers.
- Do we do math automatically, even when told to ignore it?
Just seeing a multiplication problem slowed people's ability to name its ink colour as much as seeing a word did, and harder problems slowed them more, suggesting arithmetic facts are processed automatically.
- Do preschoolers see numbers on a log scale or a straight line?
Even 3- to 5-year-olds who could not yet count placed dot sets on a number line in a more evenly spaced (linear) than compressed (logarithmic) way, which challenges the idea that young children's number sense starts out logarithmic.
- Can the link between numbers and space be split between two people?
People judged numbers slightly faster when a human partner's arrow rule matched the small-left, large-right number line, but a computer partner produced no such effect.
- Do we learn that odd numbers 'go with' a colour without noticing?
When even and odd (or small and large) digits usually appeared in particular colours, people doing a simple colour task learned these category-colour links, mostly without realising it.
- Do small numbers pull young children's movements to the left?
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.
- Do more colours make a crowd of dots look bigger?
Arrays made of many different colours looked more numerous than one-colour arrays, while colour helped counting only when same-coloured items were grouped together.
- Does how we use numbers in language shape how we compare them?
How similar two numbers are in everyday language use predicted how quickly people could say which was larger better than the actual difference between the numbers did, with some sign that digits and number words are represented differently.