Priming effects of arithmetic signs in 10‐ to 15‐year‐old children

Abstract

In this research, 10‐ to 12‐ and 13‐ to 15‐year‐old children were presented with very simple addition and multiplication problems involving operands from 1 to 4. Critically, the arithmetic sign was presented before the operands in half of the trials, whereas it was presented at the same time as the operands in the other half. Our results indicate that presenting the ‘x’ sign before the operands of a multiplication problem does not speed up the solving process, irrespective of the age of children. In contrast, presenting the ‘+’ sign before the operands of an addition problem facilitates the solving process, but only in 13 to 15‐year‐old children. Such priming effects of the arithmetic sign have been previously interpreted as the result of a pre‐activation of an automated counting procedure, which can be applied as soon as the operands are presented. Therefore, our results echo previous conclusions of the literature that simple additions but not multiplications can be solved by fast counting procedures. More importantly, we show here that these procedures are possibly convoked automatically by children after the age of 13 years. At a more theoretical level, our results do not support the theory that simple additions are solved through retrieval of the answers from long‐term memory by experts. Rather, the development of expertise for mental addition would consist in an acceleration of procedures until automatization.

Do production and verification tasks in arithmetic rely on the same cognitive mechanisms? A test using alphabet arithmetic

“…If the goal of the researchers is to collect precise and ecological data, then a production task is more appropriate. However, such level of precision is possible only when participants give their response orally and when, to correct for voice-key failures, solution times for each of the oral response are manually adjusted to correspond to the onset of the spectrogram (e.g., Poletti et al, 2021). Despite the precision of such approach, not any questions can be answered directly using a production task.…”