Recent studies have highlighted the importance of ordinality skills in early numerical development. Here, we investigate individual differences in ordering sets of items and suggest that children might also differ in their tendency to spontaneously recognize and use numerical order in everyday situations. This study investigated the individual…

The processing of ordinally organized information is a characteristic of both serial-order working memory and numerical cognition. Serial positions of items presented within a list follow an ordinal organization when stored in working memory, whereas numbers are based on an ordinal structure stored in long-term memory. We tested the hypothesis…

Working memory capacity plays a major role in many applied contexts, and it is important to be able to accurately measure this construct. The current studies tested whether the modality of administration of the letter-number sequencing task affects performance on the task. The letter-number sequencing task is a working memory capacity measure…

When placing numbers along a number line with endpoints 0 and 1000, children generally space numbers logarithmically until around the age of 7, when they shift to a predominantly linear pattern of responding. This developmental shift of responding on the number placement task has been argued to be indicative of a shift in the format of the…

Although it is established that reading fluency is more strongly related to serial naming of symbols than to naming of isolated items ("serial superiority effect"), the reason for the difference remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of executive functions in explaining the serial superiority effect. One…

Much of Stewart Hulse's career was spent analyzing how animals can extract patterned information from sequences of stimuli. Yet an additional form of information contained in a sequence may be the number of times different elements occurred. Experiments that required numerical discrimination between different stimulus items presented in sequence…

Whether two-digit numbers are represented holistically (each digit pair processed as one number) or compositionally (each digit pair processed separately as a decade digit and a unit digit) remains unresolved. Two experiments were conducted to examine the distance, magnitude, and SNARC effects in a number-matching task involving two-digit numbers.…

Working memory is the cognitive ability to hold a discrete amount of information in mind in an accessible state for utilization in mental tasks. This cognitive ability is impaired in many clinical populations. There have been a number of theoretical shifts in the way that working memory is conceptualized and assessed in the experimental…