Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2012 Feb;141(1):134-49. doi: 10.1037/a0024427. Epub 2011 Jul 18.
Mental abacus (MA) is a system for performing rapid and precise arithmetic by manipulating a mental representation of an abacus, a physical calculation device. Previous work has speculated that MA is based on visual imagery, suggesting that it might be a method of representing exact number nonlinguistically, but given the limitations on visual working memory, it is unknown how MA structures could be stored. We investigated the structure of the representations underlying MA in a group of children in India. Our results suggest that MA is represented in visual working memory by splitting the abacus into a series of columns, each of which is independently stored as a unit with its own detailed substructure. In addition, we show that the computations of practiced MA users (but not those of control participants) are relatively insensitive to verbal interference, consistent with the hypothesis that MA is a nonlinguistic format for exact numerical computation.
心算算盘（MA）是一种通过操作算盘的心理表象进行快速精确计算的系统，算盘是一种物理计算设备。先前的研究推测 MA 基于视觉意象，这表明它可能是一种非语言表示精确数字的方法，但由于视觉工作记忆的限制，尚不清楚 MA 结构如何存储。我们在印度的一组儿童中研究了 MA 所基于的表示结构。我们的研究结果表明，MA 通过将算盘分割成一系列列来在视觉工作记忆中表示，每一列都作为一个独立的单元存储，具有自己的详细子结构。此外，我们还表明，经过练习的 MA 用户的计算（而不是对照组参与者的计算）相对不受言语干扰的影响，这与 MA 是精确数值计算的非语言格式的假设一致。
