The effects of phonological and visual-spatial interference on children’s arithmetical performance

By Bruce McKenzie, Rebecca Bull, C. Gray. Educational & Child Psychology, 2003

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Investigations of the cognitive processes involved in adults’ mental arithmetic have shown the importance of phonological rather than visual codes in performance (e.g. Logie, Gilhooly & Wynn; 1994). However, children’s subjective descriptions of their strategies in arithmetic reveal much more variable strategy use, suggesting that both slave systems of working memory may be involved in arithmetical performance in this age group. This experiment tested children in two age groups (6 to 7 and 8 to 9 years) on a simple mental arithmetic task under three conditions; baseline, phonological disruption and visuospatial disruption, in an attempt to determine the cognitive processes and strategies being used in arithmetic at various points throughout development. The results showed significant and marked lowering of performance in the younger children with concurrent visuospatial disruption, a smaller effect being observed in the older children. Conversely, while the younger children were unaffected by concurrent phonological disruption the older children were. These results support the hypothesis that children use different strategies at different ages; younger children utilise almost exclusively visuospatial strategies in mental arithmetic, whereas older children use a mixture of phonological and visual-spatial strategies.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d4f1d614ec7cb483e9b45fdb8bf23052289dd3d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

Skills underlying mathematics: The role of executive function in the development of mathematics proficiency (2014, unknown): “McKenzie et al. (2003) showed that 8-9-year-olds' arithmetic performance was affected by both verbal and visuospatial disruption, while 6-7-year- olds were only affected by visuospatial disruption.”
The relationship between visuospatial sketchpad capacity and children's mathematical skills (2008, background): “In line with previous research this may suggest that the overall contribution of the VSSP to children’s mathematics decreases with age (e.g., McKenzie et al., 2003).”
Working Memory and Children’s Mathematical Skills: Implications for mathematical development and mathematics curricula (2006, result): “The pattern of results observed in our data is consistent with McKenzie et al. (2003) who recently demonstrated, using a dual-task design, that younger children use visuo-spatial strategies in mental arithmetic, while older children use a mixture of phonological and visuo-spatial strategies.”
Working memory and mathematics: A review of developmental, individual difference, and cognitive approaches. (2010, background): “McKenzie, Bull, and Gray (2003) examined the importance of phonological and visual–spatial codes in simple arithmetic performance at different ages.”
Individual differences in arithmetic (2012, background): “Bull and her colleagues (Bull & Johnston 1997; Bull & Scherif, 2001; Bull, Johnston, & Roy, 1999; McKenzie et al., 2003) investigated the relationship between 6- to 8-yearold children’s mathematical skills and their performance on several different measures of working memory and ‘executive function’”
Do children with autism use inner speech and visuospatial resources for the service of executive control? Evidence from suppression in dual tasks. (2010, methodology): “Of course, these results should not be taken to imply that TD children do not flexibly switch strategies or differentially allocate strategy representations to suit task circumstances (e.g. Hitch, Woodin, & Baker, 1989; McKenzie et al., 2003).”
Brief report—Phonological awareness and visual-spatial sketchpad functioning predict early arithmetic attainment: Evidence from a longitudinal study (2008, background): “…relationship between performance on verbally presented arithmetic problems and phonological processing may exist in young children, the results of McKenzie, Bull, and Gray (2003) indicate that younger children’s arithmetic performance is less reliant on phonological representations than that of…”
Pathways to mathematics: longitudinal predictors of performance. (2010, background): “…memory in mathematical development has indicated that the spatial span task (also known as Corsi or block span) is a useful index of visualspatial working memory in young children (Bull et al., 2008; Holmes et al., 2008; McKenzie et al., 2003; Rasmussen & Bisanz, 2005; Simmons et al., 2008).”