ArticleCognition2016
Fast automated counting procedures in addition problem solving: When are they used and why are they mistaken for retrieval?
Article in Cognition, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Spatial attention in mental arithmetic: A literature review and meta-analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Pooled it
- Developmental changes in similarity between neural representations of mental arithmetic and artificial neural networks.iScience · 2026Article
- Temporal order of activations and interactions during arithmetic calculations measured by intracranial electrophysiological recordings in the human brain.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Crossroads in the Learning Brain: The Neural Overlap Between Arithmetic and Phonological Processing.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Tablet-based arithmetic fluency assessment reveals developments in math cognition and math achievement from childhood to adolescence.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Successive Activations across the Human Brain during Simple Arithmetic Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
- Neural evidence for procedural automatization during cognitive development: Intraparietal response to changes in very-small addition problem-size increases with age.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- How to prevent cognitive overload in the walking-arithmetic dual task among patients with Parkinson's disease.BMC neurology · 2023Observational
- The Neural Mechanisms of the Effect of Spontaneous Insight on Re-Solution: An ERP Study.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Article
- Proposal for Investigating Self-Efficacy in Mathematics Using a Portable EEG System.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2023Article
- Continuous manipulation of mental representations is compromised in cerebellar degeneration.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2022Article
- Automatization through Practice: The Opportunistic-Stopping Phenomenon Called into Question.Cognitive science · 2021Article
- Do production and verification tasks in arithmetic rely on the same cognitive mechanisms? A test using alphabet arithmetic.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2021Article
- Are small additions solved by direct retrieval from memory or automated counting procedures? A rejoinder to Chen and Campbell (2018).Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Article
- Assessing orienting of attention to understand the time course of mental calculation.Cognitive processing · 2020Article
- Early Engagement of Parietal Cortex for Subtraction Solving Predicts Longitudinal Gains in Behavioral Fluency in Children.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Article
- Decoding the processing stages of mental arithmetic with magnetoencephalography.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2019Article
- A commentary on Chen and Campbell (2017): Is there a clear case for addition fact recall?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2018Article
- Brain Mechanisms of Arithmetic: A Crucial Role for Ventral Temporal Cortex.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Contrary to a widespread assumption, a recent study suggested that adults do not solve very small additions by directly retrieving their answer from memory, but rely instead on highly automated and fast counting procedures (Barrouillet & Thevenot, 2013). The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that these automated compiled procedures are restricted to small quantities that do not exceed the size of the focus of attention (i.e., 4 elements). For this purpose, we analyzed the response times of ninety adult participants when solving the 81 additions with operands from 1 to 9. Even when focusing on small problems (i.e. with sums ⩽10) reported by participants as being solved by direct retrieval, chronometric analyses revealed a strong size effect. Response times increased linearly with the magnitude of the operands testifying for the involvement of a sequential multistep procedure. However, this size effect was restricted to the problems involving operands from 1 to 4, whereas the pattern of response times for other small problems was compatible with a retrieval hypothesis. These findings suggest that very fast responses routinely interpreted as reflecting direct retrieval of the answer from memory actually subsume compiled automated procedures that are faster than retrieval and deliver their answer while the subject remains unaware of their process, mistaking them for direct retrieval from long-term memory.
Indexed as
Identifiers
26491834What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.