Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University, 207 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA.
Dev Sci. 2011 Jan;14(1):125-35. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00962.x.
How do our mental representations of number change over development? The dominant view holds that children (and adults) possess multiple representations of number, and that age and experience lead to a shift from greater reliance upon logarithmically organized number representations to greater reliance upon more accurate, linear representations. Here we present a new theoretically motivated and empirically supported account of the development of numerical estimation, based on the idea that number-line estimation tasks entail judgments of proportion. We extend existing models of perceptual proportion judgment to the case of abstract numerical magnitude. Two experiments provide support for these models; three likely sources of developmental change in children's estimation performance are identified and discussed. This work demonstrates that proportion-judgment models provide a unified account of estimation patterns that have previously been explained in terms of a developmental shift from logarithmic to linear representations of number.
我们对数字的心理表征是如何随着发展而变化的？主流观点认为，儿童（和成人）拥有多种数字表示方式，并且年龄和经验会导致从更依赖对数组织的数字表示方式转变为更依赖更准确、线性的表示方式。在这里，我们提出了一种新的、有理论依据和经验支持的数值估计发展的解释，基于这样一种观点，即数轴估计任务需要进行比例判断。我们将现有的感知比例判断模型扩展到抽象数值大小的情况。两项实验为这些模型提供了支持；确定并讨论了儿童估计表现中三个可能的发展变化来源。这项工作表明，比例判断模型为以前用从对数到线性的数字表示方式的发展转变来解释的估计模式提供了一个统一的解释。
