Short term memory is famously limited in capacity to Miller's (1956) magic number 7 plus or minus 2--or, in many more recent studies, about 4 plus or minus 1 "chunks" of information. But the definition of "chunk" in this context has never been clear, referring only to a set of items that are treated collectively as a single unit. We propose a new…

A dedicated, non-symbolic, system yielding imprecise representations of large quantities (approximate number system, or ANS) has been shown to support arithmetic calculations of addition and subtraction. In the present study, 5-7-year-old children without formal schooling in multiplication and division were given a task requiring a scalar…

In recent years, a strong functional relationship between finger counting and number processing has been suggested. Developmental studies have shown specific effects of the structure of the individual finger counting system on arithmetic abilities. Moreover, the orientation of the mental quantity representation ("number line") seems to be…

There is evidence for both semantic and asemantic routes for naming Arabic digits, but neuropsychological dissociations suggest that number-fact retrieval (2x3=6) can inhibit the semantic route for digit naming. Here, we tested the hypothesis that such inhibition should slow digit naming, based on the principle that reduced access to multiple…

McCrink (McCrink, Dehaene, & Dehaene-Lambertz (2007). "Moving along the number line: Operational momentum in nonsymbolic arithmetic." "Perception and Psychophysics," 69(8), 1324-1333) documented an "Operational Momentum" (OM) effect--overestimation of addition and underestimation of subtraction outcomes in non-symbolic (dot pattern) arithmetic. We…