Assessing the Approximate Number System no relati

Authors: Mathieu Guillaume Wim Gevers Alain Content

Publish Date: 2015/03/06

Volume: 80, Issue: 2, Pages: 248-258

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Abstract

Whether our general numerical skills and the mathematical knowledge that we acquire at school are entwined is a debated issue which many researchers are still striving to investigate The findings reported in the literature are actually inconsistent some studies emphasized the existence of a relationship between the acuity of the Approximate Number System ANS and arithmetic competence while some others did not observe any significant correlation One potential explanation of the discrepancy might stem from the evaluation of the ANS itself In the present study we correlated two measures used to index ANS acuity with arithmetic performance These measures were the Weber fraction w computed from a numerical comparison task and the coefficient of variation CV computed from a numerical estimation task Arithmetic performance correlated with estimation CV but not with comparison w We further investigated the meaning of this result by taking the relationship between w and CV into account We expected a tight relation as both these measures are believed to assess ANS acuity Crucially however w and CV did not correlate with each other Moreover the value of w was modulated by the congruity of the relation between numerical magnitude and nonnumerical visual cues potentially accounting for the lack of correlation between the measures Our findings thus challenge the overuse of w to assess ANS acuity and more generally put into question the relevance of correlating this measure with arithmetic without any deeper understanding of what they are really indexingMathieu Guillaume was supported by a grant from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research FRSFNRS Belgium The authors declare no conflict of interest that might be interpreted as influencing the research and APA ethical standards were followed in the conduct of the study Authors gratefully thank all the participants for their collaboration with the study Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Mathieu Guillaume maguillaulbacbe

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