ArticleScientific reports2017
Infants learn better from left to right: a directional bias in infants' sequence learning.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The profile of abstract rule learning in infancy: Meta-analytic and experimental evidence.Developmental science · 2019Pooled it
- Spatial representation of serial order in working memory: a cross-cultural comparison between Japanese and Italian adults.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Neural entrainment to visual rules in infant and adult brain.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Learning and generalization of repetition-based rules in autism.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Ordinality and Verbal Framing Influence Preschoolers' Memory for Spatial Structure.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2023Article
- Abstract representations of small sets in newborns.Cognition · 2022Article
- Visual Implicit Learning Abilities in Infants at Familial Risk for Language and Learning Impairments.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Seven-month-old infants detect symmetrical structures in multi-featured abstract visual patterns.PloS one · 2022Article
- Electrophysiological Evidence of Space-Number Associations in 9-Month-Old Infants.Child development · 2021Article
- Eye Tracking Lateralized Spatial Associations in Early Childhood.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2021Article
- Can a Single Representational Object Account for Different Number-Space Mappings?Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Asymmetric practices of reading and writing shape visuospatial attention and discrimination.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Infants' Learning of Rule-Based Visual Sequences Predicts Language Outcome at 2 Years.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Operational momentum for magnitude ordering in preschool children and adults.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2019Article
- From Innate Spatial Biases to Enculturated Spatial Cognition: The Case of Spatial Associations in Number and Other Sequences.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A wealth of studies show that human adults map ordered information onto a directional spatial continuum. We asked whether mapping ordinal information into a directional space constitutes an early predisposition, already functional prior to the acquisition of symbolic knowledge and language. While it is known that preverbal infants represent numerical order along a left-to-right spatial continuum, no studies have investigated yet whether infants, like adults, organize any kind of ordinal information onto a directional space. We investigated whether 7-month-olds' ability to learn high-order rule-like patterns from visual sequences of geometric shapes was affected by the spatial orientation of the sequences (left-to-right vs. right-to-left). Results showed that infants readily learn rule-like patterns when visual sequences were presented from left to right, but not when presented from right to left. This result provides evidence that spatial orientation critically determines preverbal infants' ability to perceive and learn ordered information in visual sequences, opening to the idea that a left-to-right spatially organized mental representation of ordered dimensions might be rooted in biologically-determined constraints on human brain development.
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Registered trials
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