A Visuomotor Perspective on Developing Temporal and Spatial Representations of Number

Despite being an abstract concept, our representation of number appears to be grounded in the physical realities of time and space. However, very little research investigates the relationship between these three concepts in children. Thus, this thesis investigated children’s ability to represent number temporally (pertaining to time) using frequency processing tasks, and their ability to represent number spatially using a novel adaption of a number line task. Firstly, two experiments (Chapters 2 & 3) revealed that children are remarkably accurate at recalling the frequency of both everyday events, specifically their intake of fruit smoothies, and of short term events, namely shape repetitions in a computer based task. Secondly, it was observed that Western educated adults have a default preference for representing number spatially with small numbers on the left and large numbers on the right (Chapter 4). Whilst these default preferences were not observed in children (Chapter 5), there was some evidence that cultural background can influence the direction of these preferences (Chapter 6). Nevertheless, irrelevant of directional preferences, children became more accurate at representing number spatially with age; this ability was related to both mathematical achievement and fine motor skills.