title: Set size and culture influence children's attention to number.
abstract: Much research evidences a system in adults and young children for approximately representing quantity. Here we provide evidence that the bias to attend to discrete quantity versus other dimensions may be mediated by set size and culture. Preschool-age English-speaking children in the United States and Japanese-speaking children in Japan were tested in a match-to-sample task where number was pitted against cumulative surface area in both large and small numerical set comparisons. Results showed that children from both cultures were biased to attend to the number of items for small sets. Large set responses also showed a general attention to number when ratio difficulty was easy. However, relative to the responses for small sets, attention to number decreased for both groups; moreover, both U.S. and Japanese children showed a significant bias to attend to total amount for difficult numerical ratio distances, although Japanese children shifted attention to total area at relatively smaller set sizes than U.S. children. These results add to our growing understanding of how quantity is represented and how such representation is influenced by context--both cultural and perceptual.
authors.affiliation: Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA. Electronic address: lcantrell@ucdavis.edu.
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cantrell
authors.affiliation: Child Development Program, California State University at Dominguez Hills, USA.
authors.forename: Megumi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kuwabara
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
authors.forename: Linda B
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D008297:Male; D008433:Mathematics; D014481:United States; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: Attention; Cross-culture; Holistic; Number; Perception; Quantity; Vision