AUTHOR=Lonnemann Jan , Linkersdörfer Janosch , Nagler Telse , Hasselhorn Marcus , Lindberg Sven 

TITLE=Spatial representations of numbers and letters in children

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=4

YEAR=2013

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00544

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00544

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>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 (<italic>n</italic> = 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.</p>