Defever, E. 1, 4 , Sasanguie, D. 1, 4 , Vandewaetere, M. 2, 3 & Reynvoet, B. 1, 4
1 Department of Psychology, K.U. Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
2 CIP&T, Centre for Instructional Psychology and Technology, K.U.Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
3 iTEC, Interdisciplinary Research on Technology, Communication and Education, K.U.Leuven, 8500 Kortrijk, Belgium
4 Subfaculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Department of Psychology, K.U.Leuven - Campus Kortrijk, 8500 Kortrijk, Belgium
We wanted to clarify the moderators (i.e. numerical distance, size, physical similarity) that influence adults’ and children’s responses when conducting a symbolic (i.e. digits) and non-symbolic (i.e. dot collections) same-different task and to investigate whether these influences change over development. In addition, we examined the relationship between these moderators and mathematical ability. Our findings demonstrate that the responses of the youngest children in the symbolic same-different task were equally influenced by the magnitude information and the physical similarity of the digits, while the older age groups mainly used the physical similarity. Apparently, a same-different task with digits is not an ideal measure to study the development of magnitude representations. In our non-symbolic task, the size of the distance effect was similar in all age groups, which suggests that the representations of non-symbolic numerosities are stable over development. The size of the distance effects was not influenced by subjects’ mathematical ability.