1. Cognition. 2016 Feb 3;150:68-76. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.01.018. [Epub
ahead of print]
Beyond magnitude: Judging ordinality of symbolic number is unrelated to magnitude
comparison and independently relates to individual differences in arithmetic.
Goffin C(1), Ansari D(2).
Author information:
(1)Numerical Cognition Laboratory, Department of Psychology & Brain and Mind
Institute, The University of Western Ontario, Canada. (2)Numerical Cognition
Laboratory, Department of Psychology & Brain and Mind Institute, The University
of Western Ontario, Canada. Electronic address: daniel.ansari@uwo.ca.
In the field of numerical cognition, ordinality, or the sequence of numerals, has
received much less attention than cardinality, or the number of items in a set.
Therefore it is unclear whether the numerical effects generated from ordinality
and cardinality tasks are associated, and whether they relate to math achievement
and more domain-general variables in similar ways. To address these questions,
sixty adults completed ordinality, cardinality, visual-spatial working memory,
inhibitory control and math achievement tasks. The numerical distance effect from
the cardinality task and the reverse distance effect from the ordinality task
were both relatively reliable but not statistically significantly associated with
one another. Additionally, both distance effects predicted independent unique
variance in math scores, even when visual-spatial working memory and inhibitory
control were included in the regression model. These findings provide support for
dissociation in the mechanisms underlying cardinal and ordinal processing of
number symbols and thereby highlight the critical role played by ordinality in
symbolic numerical cognition.
Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
PMID: 26851638 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]