Reynvoet, B. 1 , Defever, E. 1 & Goebel, S. M. 2
1 Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Belgium
2 Department of Psychology, University of York, UK
Today, it is generally assumed that children and adults with arithmetic difficulties have a defected internal magnitude representation and/or have problems associating symbols to this internal magnitude representation. However, most of the evidence is obtained in comparison tasks and recently it has been argued that comparison data may reflect more general decisional mechanisms instead of representational characteristics. We re-evaluated these hypotheses underlying arithmetical difficulties with the priming paradigm. The priming distance effect is considered as a direct measure of the underlying magnitude representation. We will present data on individual differences in the priming distance effect in children and adults and their relation with mathematical ability. The results show relations between the size of the priming effect and mathematical ability. These results will be discussed against the hypotheses underlying arithmetic difficulties.