Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 21, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
Published on: May 15, 2019
Representation of numerical and non-numerical order in children
Ilaria Berteletti1, Daniela Lucangeli, Marco Zorzi
1Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Padova, Italy.
Abstract:
The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet (i.e., letter sequence) and the calendar year (i.e., month sequence). The representation of non-numerical order showed the same developmental pattern previously observed for numerical representation, with a logarithmic mapping in the youngest children and a shift to linear mapping in older children. Although the individual ability to position non-numerical items was related to the child's knowledge of the sequence, a significant amount of unique variance was explained by her type of number-line representation. These results suggest that the child's conception of numerical order is generalized to non-numerical sequences and that the concept of linearity is acquired in the numerical domain first and progressively extended to all ordinal sequences.
Related Concept Videos
How Data are Classified: Numerical Data
Quantitative data may be either discrete or continuous. All quantitative data that take on only specific numerical...
Ordinal Level of Measurement
Data measured using an ordinal scale are similar to nominal scale data, but there is one major difference. The ordinal scale data can be ordered. An example of ordinal scale data is a list of the top five national parks in the...
Piaget's Stage 3 of Cognitive Development
Conservation and Constancy of Quantity
A significant cognitive milestone in the concrete...
Ranks
Real Number Operations
Piaget's Stage 2 of Cognitive Development
