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Updated: Sep 28, 2026

Multimedia Battery for Assessment of Cognitive and Basic Skills in Mathematics (BM-PROMA)
Published on: August 28, 2021
The construction of large number representations in adults
Hilary Barth1, Nancy Kanwisher, Elizabeth Spelke
1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. hilary@wjh.harvard
Abstract:
What is the nature of our mental representation of quantity? We find that human adults show no performance cost of comparing numerosities across vs. within visual and auditory stimulus sets, or across vs. within simultaneous and sequential sets. In addition, reaction time and performance in such tasks are determined by the ratio of the numerosities to be compared; absolute set size has no effect. These findings suggest that modality-specific stimulus properties undergo a non-iterative transformation into representations of quantity that are independent of the modality or format of the stimulus.
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