Proefschrift Kolkman – Make it count

Meijke Kolkman, dissertatie 2013

Universiteit Utrecht

Kolkman, M. (2013). Make it count! Numerical development and the role of working memory, Faculty Social Sciences (pp. 149). Utrecht: Utrecht University.

Abstract
The aim of this dissertation was to unravel the processes that contribute to the development of number-to-quantity mapping skills. According to a widely shared view, mapping skills originate from a specialized cognitive system in which numbers and the quantities they denote are spatially ordered from left to right with smaller quantities associated with the left side of the space and larger quantities with the right side of space, often referred to as the ‘mental number line’.

The experiments were undertaken in Kindergarten (age 4-6). The author states that the experiments do not point at the existence of the ‘innate mental number line’, she states that the development of mapping skills is rather based on general skills for procession visual-spatial information in cooperation with symbolic number skills.