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Spatial–numerical associations in first-graders: evidence from a manual-pointing task

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Abstract

The current study investigated whether children’s mental representations of numbers are organized spatially at the onset of formal schooling using a manual-pointing task. First-graders (N = 77) saw four numbers (1, 3, 7, 9) presented randomly in four spatial positions (extreme left, left, right, extreme right) on a touch screen. In a Go/No-Go task, children were asked to press the appearing numbers as fast and accurately as possible, but only when the numbers were “smaller” (or “larger” in a different block) than 5. Results indicated that response times were significantly affected by the spatial position in which the different numbers were presented. Response times for small numbers (1 and 3) increased and response times for large numbers (7 and 9) decreased, the more they were presented towards the right side of the screen. These findings suggested that first-graders spontaneously employed a spatial number representation that was oriented from left to right. Furthermore, this left-to-right organization could not be easily changed by priming a different direction. Our findings indicate that even young children map numbers continuously onto space.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Wenke Möhring, Jacqueline Curiger & Andrea Frick

  2. Department of Human Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan

    Masami Ishihara

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 62, 4055, Basel, Switzerland

    Wenke Möhring

Authors
  1. Wenke Möhring
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  2. Masami Ishihara
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  3. Jacqueline Curiger
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  4. Andrea Frick
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Correspondence to Wenke Möhring.

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Ethical approval

All procedures performed in the current study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

This research was supported by a Research Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation # PP00P1_150486. We are grateful to Lisa Heid and Sarah Dubach for their support with data collection.

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Möhring, W., Ishihara, M., Curiger, J. et al. Spatial–numerical associations in first-graders: evidence from a manual-pointing task. Psychological Research 83, 885–893 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0904-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0904-4

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