Developmental Changes in Number Personification by Elementary School Children

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Developmental Psychology
• Number Cognition

Background:

• Children commonly personify inanimate objects, fostering social understanding.
• This tendency may extend to abstract concepts like numbers, influencing early cognition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if children attribute personalities to numbers.
• To examine how number personification changes across development.
• To explore the role of number personification in numerical comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a methodology adapted from ordinal linguistic personification (OLP) measurement.
• Administered questionnaires to 151 non-synesthetic children (9-12 years old) and 55 non-synesthetic adults.
• Quantified the frequency and consistency of number personification in both age groups.

Main Results:

• Children demonstrated a significantly higher tendency for number personification than adults.
• Children exhibited greater temporal consistency and meaningfulness in their number attributions.
• Unique personality traits were assigned by children to individual numbers (0-9).

Conclusions:

• Number personification is prevalent in childhood and decreases with age.
• This developmental shift in attributing personalities to numbers may facilitate understanding numerical relationships.
• Number personification could serve as a cognitive tool for early mathematical learning.