TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lonnemann, Jan
A1  - Linkersdörfer, Janosch
A1  - Nagler, Telse
A1  - Hasselhorn, Marcus
A1  - Lindberg, Sven
T1  - Spatial representations of numbers and letters in children
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - 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 toward the larger digit. A similar, but less pronounced, effect was detected for letters with spatial biases toward 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.
KW  - line bisection
KW  - mental number line
KW  - spatial representations
KW  - ordinal representations
KW  - cardinal representations
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/31706
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-317063
SN  - 1664-1078
N1  - Copyright © 2013 Lonnemann, Linkersdörfer, Nagler, Hasselhorn and Lindberg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 4
IS  - 544
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -