Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: This study presents evidence in favor of a cognitive primitives hypothesis for processing fraction magnitudes.This account holds that humans have perceptual access to fractional magnitudes and that this may be used to support symbolic fraction knowledge.In speeded cross-format comparisons, participants picked the larger of two stimuli, which were either symbolic fractions or nonsymbolic ratios composed of pairs of dot arrays or pairs of circles.Participants demonstrated distance effects across formats, demonstrating that they could compare analog fractional magnitudes independently of the particular formats in which they were presented.These results pose a challenge to innate constraints accounts that argue that human cortical structures are illsuited for processing fractions.These results may have important implications both for theorizing about the nature of human number sense and for optimizing instruction of fractional concepts.
Institutions: University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Notre Dame
OpenAlex ID: W2403434245