Unpacking Symbolic Number Comparison and Its Relation with Arithmetic in Adults ⇑ Delphine Sasanguie A,B, , Ian M
Cognition 165 (2017) 26–38 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT Original Articles Unpacking symbolic number comparison and its relation with arithmetic in adults ⇑ Delphine Sasanguie a,b, , Ian M. Lyons c, Bert De Smedt d, Bert Reynvoet a,b a Brain and Cognition, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium b Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences @Kulak, 8500 Kortrijk, Belgium c Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, 20057 Washington D.C., United States d Parenting and Special Education, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium article info abstract Article history: Symbolic number – or digit – comparison has been a central tool in the domain of numerical cognition for Received 15 July 2016 decades. More recently, individual differences in performance on this task have been shown to robustly Revised 13 April 2017 relate to individual differences in more complex math processing – a result that has been replicated Accepted 24 April 2017 across many different age groups. In this study, we ‘unpack’ the underlying components of digit compar- Available online 28 April 2017 ison (i.e. digit identification, digit to number-word matching, digit ordering and general comparison) in a sample of adults. In a first experiment, we showed that digit comparison performance was most strongly Keywords: related to digit ordering ability – i.e., the ability to judge whether symbolic numbers are in numerical Digit comparison order. Furthermore, path analyses indicated that the relation between digit comparison and arithmetic Arithmetic Working memory was partly mediated by digit ordering and fully mediated when non-numerical (letter) ordering was also Long-term memory entered into the model.
[Show full text]