文章基本信息

标题：Spatial representations of numbers and letters in children
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作者：Lonnemann, Jan ; Linkersdörfer, Janosch ; Nagler, Telse 等
期刊名称：Frontiers in Psychology
电子版ISSN：1664-1078
出版年度：2013
卷号：4
页码：1-5
DOI：10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00544
出版社：Frontiers Media
摘要：Different lines of evidence suggest that children’s mental representations of numbers are spatially organized in form of a mental number line. It is, however, still unclear whether a spatial organization is specific for the numerical domain or also applies to other ordinal sequences in children. In the present study, children (n = 129) aged 8-9 years were asked to indicate the midpoint of lines flanked by task-irrelevant digits or letters. We found that the localization of the midpoint was systematically biased towards the larger digit. A similar, but less pronounced, effect was detected for letters with spatial biases towards the letter succeeding in the alphabet. Instead of assuming domain-specific forms of spatial representations, we suggest that ordinal information expressing relations between different items of a sequence might be spatially coded in children, whereby numbers seem to convey this kind of information in the most salient way.
关键词：line bisection; mental number line; spatial representations; ordinal representations; cardinal representations