ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology2018
Observation of directional storybook reading influences young children's counting direction.
Article in Journal of experimental child psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Number comparison in bilinguals is not affected by their second language.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Spatial representation of serial order in working memory: a cross-cultural comparison between Japanese and Italian adults.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Does the Brain Care Which Direction We Read? A Cross-Cultural tDCS Study on Functional Lateralization of Number Processing.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- One direction? Cultural aspects of the mental number line beyond reading direction.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Ordinality and Verbal Framing Influence Preschoolers' Memory for Spatial Structure.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2023Article
- Abstract concepts: external influences, internal constraints, and methodological issues.Psychological research · 2022Review
- Electrophysiological Evidence of Space-Number Associations in 9-Month-Old Infants.Child development · 2021Article
- The Relationship Between Confidence and Conformity in a Non-routine Counting Task With Young Children: Dedicated to the Memory of Purificación Rodríguez.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Eye Tracking Lateralized Spatial Associations in Early Childhood.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2021Article
- Article
- Unstable world: Recent experience affects spatial perception.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Article
- Infants' Learning of Rule-Based Visual Sequences Predicts Language Outcome at 2 Years.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Number concepts: abstract and embodied.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Scanning of speechless comics changes spatial biases in mental model construction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- From Innate Spatial Biases to Enculturated Spatial Cognition: The Case of Spatial Associations in Number and Other Sequences.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Spatial-Numerical Associations Enhance the Short-Term Memorization of Digit Locations.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Developmental Changes in the Effect of Active Left and Right Head Rotation on Random Number Generation.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Why Numbers Are Embodied Concepts.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Even before formal schooling, children map numbers onto space in a directional manner. The origin of this preliterate spatial-numerical association is still debated. We investigated the role of enculturation for shaping the directionality of the association between numbers and space, focusing on counting behavior in 3- to 5-year-old preliterate children. Two studies provide evidence that, after observing reading from storybooks (left-to-right or right-to-left reading) children change their counting direction in line with the direction of observed reading. Just observing visuospatial directional movements had no such effect on counting direction. Complementarily, we document that book illustrations, prevalent in children's cultures, exhibit directionality that conforms to the direction of a culture's written language. We propose that shared book reading activates spatiotemporal representations of order in young children, which in turn affect their spatial representation of numbers.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What 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.