ArticleDevelopmental science2019
A mental number line in human newborns.
Article in Developmental science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 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
61 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial-numerical associations survive spatial frequency equalization in an adult unimanual SNARC task.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Towards a unified biology of vertebrate number sense.Communications biology · 2026Review
- Number-action coupling across the lifespan: Sensorimotor foundations of numerical cognition.iScience · 2026Review
- Numbers Driving Space: Experience With Numerical Sequences Modulates Spatial Behavior in Newborn Chicks (Gallus gallus).Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Ace in the hole: playing cards show the role of order and magnitude in the SNARC effect.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Measuring SNARC effect: different task setups reveal divergent spatial-numerical associations.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Kicking the mental number line: a kinematic investigation of numerical processing in childhood.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Numerically induced attentional biases in horizontal, vertical, and two-dimensional shapes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Diverging roles of domain-specific anxieties in number-space associations. Insights from a multi-directional number line paradigm.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Prenatal light exposure affects number sense and the mental number line in young domestic chicks.eLife · 2025Article
- Crossing the Boundary: No Catastrophic Limits on Infants' Capacity to Represent Linguistic Sequences.Developmental science · 2025Article
- A SNARC-like effect for visual speed.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- A left-to-right bias in number-space mapping across ages and cultures.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Symbolic and non-symbolic numbers differently affect center identification in a number-line bisection task.PloS one · 2025Article
- One and only SNARC? Spatial-Numerical Associations are not fully flexible and depend on both relative and absolute number magnitude.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- One direction? Cultural aspects of the mental number line beyond reading direction.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Dichotomous horizontal representation of acute deterioration risk on illnesses.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- What makes different number-space mappings interact?Psychological research · 2024Article
- Adaptation biases the parallel perception of subitized numerosities.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Magnitude shifts spatial attention from left to right in rhesus monkeys as in the human mental number line.iScience · 2024Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans represent numbers on a mental number line with smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right side. A left-to-right oriented spatial-numerical association, (SNA), has been demonstrated in animals and infants. However, the possibility that SNA is learnt by early exposure to caregivers' directional biases is still open. We conducted two experiments: in Experiment 1, we tested whether SNA is present at birth and in Experiment 2, we studied whether it depends on the relative rather than the absolute magnitude of numerousness. Fifty-five-hour-old newborns, once habituated to a number (12), spontaneously associated a smaller number (4) with the left and a larger number (36) with the right side (Experiment 1). SNA in neonates is not absolute but relative. The same number (12) was associated with the left side rather than the right side whenever the previously experienced number was larger (36) rather than smaller (4) (Experiment 2). Control on continuous physical variables showed that the effect is specific of discrete magnitudes. These results constitute strong evidence that in our species SNA originates from pre-linguistic and biological precursors in the brain.
Indexed as
Identifiers
30676679What 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.