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Abstract:

Throughout development individual differences in children’s arithmetic performance become more strongly related to order processing, i.e., the ability to decide whether a sequence of numbers is presented in an order. Previous studies suggested that this relationship emerges because retrieval from long-term memory becomes more important during both order judgements and arithmetic. The current study further examined this assumption by investigating the behavioural effects in an order judgement task and its relation with arithmetic in children of first and sixth grade. Results showed that order processing was strongly related with arithmetic in children of sixth grade but not in children of first grade. Additionally, children of first grade processed ascending sequences more accurately than descending sequences. However, no reaction time differences and similar reversed distance effects were observed comparing ascending and descending sequences, indicating that children did not rely yet on retrieval strategies. In contrast, children from sixth grade processed ascending sequences faster than descending sequences and the reversed distance effect was also larger for ascending than for descending sequences, mimicking findings obtained in adults and suggesting that sixth graders rely on retrieval during the order judgement task resulting in a stronger relation with arithmetic.