Clayton Sarah, Inglis Matthew, Gilmore Camilla
1 Department of Health Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
2 Mathematics Education Centre, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2019 Mar;72(3):436-445. doi: 10.1177/1747021818755296. Epub 2018 Feb 8.
Nonsymbolic comparison tasks are widely used to measure children's and adults' approximate number system (ANS) acuity. Recent evidence has demonstrated that task performance can be influenced by changes to the visual characteristics of the stimuli, leading some researchers to suggest it is unlikely that an ANS exists that can extract number information independently of the visual characteristics of the arrays. Here, we analysed 124 children's and 120 adults' dot comparison accuracy scores from three separate studies to investigate individual and developmental differences in how numerical and visual information contribute to nonsymbolic numerosity judgements. We found that, in contrast to adults, the majority of children did not use numerical information over and above visual cue information to compare quantities. This finding was consistent across different studies. The results have implications for research on the relationship between dot comparison performance and formal mathematics achievement. Specifically, if most children's performance on dot comparison tasks can be accounted for without the involvement of numerical information, it seems unlikely that observed correlations with mathematics achievement stem from ANS acuity alone.
非符号比较任务被广泛用于测量儿童和成人的近似数字系统（ANS）敏锐度。最近的证据表明，任务表现会受到刺激视觉特征变化的影响，这使得一些研究人员认为，不太可能存在一种能够独立于阵列视觉特征提取数字信息的ANS。在此，我们分析了来自三项独立研究的124名儿童和120名成人的点比较准确性分数，以调查数字和视觉信息在非符号数量判断中如何起作用的个体差异和发展差异。我们发现，与成人不同，大多数儿童在比较数量时，除了视觉线索信息之外，并未使用数字信息。这一发现在不同研究中是一致的。这些结果对关于点比较表现与形式数学成绩之间关系的研究具有启示意义。具体而言，如果大多数儿童在点比较任务中的表现可以在不涉及数字信息的情况下得到解释，那么观察到的与数学成绩的相关性似乎不太可能仅源于ANS敏锐度。
