While some researchers place negative numbers on a so-called extended mental number line to the left of positive numbers, others claim that negative numbers do not have mental representations but are processed through positive numbers combined with transformation rules. We measured spatial associations of negative numbers with a modified implicit…

Comparison shopping is good financial practice, but situations involving numbers and computations are challenging for consumers with math anxiety. We asked North Americans (N = 256) to select the better deal between two products differing in volume and price. As predicted, math anxiety was negatively related to performance on this Price Comparison…

In this study, we used multivariate decoding methods to study processing differences between canonical (montring and count) and noncanonical finger numeral configurations (FNCs). While previous research investigated these processing differences using behavioral and event-related potentials (ERP) methods, conventional univariate ERP analyses focus…

There is strong evidence from research conducted in the United States that fraction magnitude understanding supports mathematics achievement. Unfortunately, there has been little research that examines if this relation is present across educational contexts with different approaches to teaching fractions. The current study compared fourth and…

The notion that mental arithmetic is associated with shifts of spatial attention along a spatially organised mental number representation has received empirical support from three lines of research. First, participants tend to overestimate results of addition and underestimate those of subtraction problems in both exact and approximate formats.…

Previous research suggests that the Approximate Number System (ANS) allows people to approximate the cardinality of a set. This ability to discern numerical quantities may explain how meaning becomes associated with number symbols. However, recently it has been argued that ANS representations are not directly numerical, but rather are formed by…

Are there some differences so small that we cannot detect them? Are some quantities so similar (e.g., the number of spots on two speckled hens) that they simply look the same to us? Although modern psychophysical theories such as Signal Detection Theory would predict that, with enough trials, even minute differences would be perceptible at an…

This study investigates the correlates of statistics anxiety. Considering that statistics anxiety and spatial anxiety have been separately correlated with related constructs (e.g., mathematics anxiety, academic performance, etc.), the possibility that spatial anxiety plays a role in statistics anxiety is explored. When facing statistics or…

Number-recognition tasks, such as the how-many task, involve set-to-word mapping, and number-creation tasks, such as the give-n task, entail word-to-set mapping. The present study involved comparing sixty 3-year-olds' performance on the two tasks with collections of one to three items over three time points about 3 weeks apart. Inconsistent with…

For students to advance beyond arithmetic, they must learn how to attend to the structure of math notation. This process can be challenging due to students' left-to-right computing tendencies. Brackets are used in mathematics to indicate precedence but can also be used as superfluous cues and perceptual grouping mechanisms in instructional…

The authors assessed a battery of number skills in a sample of over 500 preschoolers, including both monolingual and bilingual/ multilingual learners from households at a range of socio-economic levels. Receptive vocabulary was measured in English for all children, and also in Spanish for those who spoke it. The first goal of the study was to…

From a young age, children's math achievement is influenced by individual factors, such as math anxiety. While math anxiety has been linked to math avoidance, few studies have explored this link in young children, particularly in the context of play. Because play-based instruction is commonly used for math in early childhood classrooms,…

While symbolic number processing is an important correlate for typical and low mathematics achievement, it remains to be determined whether children with high mathematics achievement also have excellent symbolic number processing abilities. We investigated this question in 64 children (aged 8 to 10), i.e., 32 children with persistent high…

Children's knowledge of the ordinal relations among number symbols is related to their mathematical learning. Ordinal knowledge has been measured using judgment (i.e., decide whether a sequence of three digits is in order) and ordering tasks (i.e., order three digits from smallest to largest). However, the question remains whether performance on…

The experience of math anxiety can have detrimental effects on students' math performance, and researchers have in recent years tried to design interventions aiming at reducing math anxiety. This meta-analysis aimed to examine the effectiveness of math anxiety interventions in reducing math anxiety and improving math performance. The meta-analysis…