Young children are sensitive to both numerical and spatial magnitude cues early in development, but many questions remain about how children's attention to magnitudes relates to their early math achievement. In two studies, we tested three hypotheses related to the flexible attention to magnitudes (FAM) account, which suggests that young…

Humans perceptually extract quantity information from our environments, be it from simple stimuli in isolation, or from relational magnitudes formed by taking ratios of pairs of simple stimuli. Some have proposed that these two types of magnitude are processed by a common system, whereas others have proposed separate systems. To test these…

Found that preschool children can form abstract concepts of left and right which are not bound to the specific training context: children were able to generalize to new figures and to new spatial locations. The nature of the preschool child's left-right judgments is discussed. (Author/RH)