Abstract
Exposure to numerical examples (seed facts) produced a substantial long-term reduction in domain-specific innumeracy. In particular, learning the populations of 24 seed countries improved accuracy of estimates of the populations of 75 untrained countries, both at the time of learning and 4 months later. Consistent with abstraction-based theories of learning and memory, the benefits of having been exposed to the seed facts were as large 4 months after the exposure as immediately after it, despite the specific populations of the seed countries having been forgotten during the interval.
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This research was supported in part by an NSERC operating grant and an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship awarded to the first author, and in part by a Mellon Foundation grant awarded to the second author. The authors thank Jeff Bisanz, Fred Conrad, and Monica Dashen for their comments on a draft of this article, and Cathy Dennler for her assistance in running the study.
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Brown, N.R., Siegler, R.S. Long-term benefits of seeding the knowledge base. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 3, 385–388 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210766
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210766