Center of Cognitive Neurosciences, Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 28;8(8):e72621. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0072621. eCollection 2013.
For some authors, the human sensitivity to numerosities would be grounded in our ability to process non-numerical magnitudes. In the present study, the developmental relationships between non numerical and numerical magnitude processing are examined in people with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder known to associate visuo-spatial and math learning disabilities. Twenty patients with WS and 40 typically developing children matched on verbal or non-verbal abilities were administered three comparison tasks in which they had to compare numerosities, lengths or durations. Participants with WS showed lower acuity (manifested by a higher Weber fraction) than their verbal matched peers when processing numerical and spatial but not temporal magnitudes, indicating that they do not present a domain-general dysfunction of all magnitude processing. Conversely, they do not differ from non-verbal matched participants in any of the three tasks. Finally, correlational analyses revealed that non-numerical and numerical acuity indexes were both related to the first mathematical acquisitions but not with later arithmetical skills.
对于一些作者来说，人类对数字的敏感性可能源于我们处理非数值大小的能力。在本研究中，研究了具有威廉姆斯综合征（WS）的个体中非数值和数值大小处理之间的发展关系，WS 是一种已知与视觉空间和数学学习障碍相关的遗传疾病。20 名 WS 患者和 40 名在言语或非言语能力上相匹配的典型发育儿童被分配到三个比较任务中，他们需要比较数字、长度或持续时间。与言语匹配的同龄人相比，WS 患者在处理数字和空间大小但不是时间大小方面表现出较低的敏感性（表现为韦伯分数较高），这表明他们并没有表现出所有大小处理的普遍功能障碍。相反，他们在三个任务中的任何一个都与非言语匹配的参与者没有区别。最后，相关分析表明，非数值和数值敏感性指标都与第一个数学习得有关，但与后来的算术技能无关。
