Numeral ordering skills and the ordinality of small numbers

Resumo

Albeit the ontogenesis of numeral ordinality is not clear yet, numeral ordering is becoming an influential line of research on children's and adults’ numericalunderstanding. The ability to discriminate whether a string of Arabic numbers is in order has emerged as a robust predictor of arithmetic and math achievementin both children and adults. In the current study, we focus on the processes underlying decision-making in the numeral order judgment task with triplets. A driftdiffusionmodel for two-choice decisions was fit to data from ninety-six undergraduates. We formulated several models that reflected different theories on hownumeral order may be stored in memory (and retrieved during numeral order judgments). Findings aligned with the hypothesis that small numbers provide moreevidence of an ordered response and that numeral ordering abilities/skills reflect the operationalization of the numerical system—i.e., the probability that anumber can cause an ascending sequence varies monotonically as a function of the position of a number on the counting sequence.