Poster #38 - The Effect of Salience on Attention to Number Persists throughout the Early School Years

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Researchers have shown that young children’s spontaneous focus on number (SFON; Hannula, & Lehtinen, 2005) during carefully-designed imitation tasks is a source of individual differences in early math learning or readiness. More recent studies demonstrate that SFON tendencies can increase based on testing (Batchelor et al., 2015) or environmental (Hannula et al, in press) conditions. Such malleability does not necessarily negate that SFON may reflect somewhat inherent tendency, but it suggests that the tendency is more contextual than spontaneous. Previously, we showed that the frequency with which children attend to number during a forced-choice matching game (Figure 1) varies based on the alternative features on which stimuli may match. When alternative features are less salient, such as when stimuli match a target on visual pattern or physical orientation (Figure 1a), children are more likely to select a number-based match, compared to when the alternative matching features are highly salient, such as color or shape (Figure 1b). When competing features are salient, number is rarely the basis of a match. These effects hold for preschoolers and adults (NSD), although adults choose more number-based responses than children. This effect of salience has implications for designing learning opportunities and instructional materials.

The aims of the present study are to replicate and extend upon earlier findings of the effects of relative salience on preschoolers’ and adults’ attention to number, with older children in Grades K, 1, or 2; and to test whether performance on the AtN task simply reflects executive function skills (e.g., flexible response patterns).

Participants were 162 children in Grades K, 1, or 2 who completed the Test of Early Math Ability, the Minnesota Executive Function Scale, the Head Toes Knees Shoulder Task, and our Attention to Number (AtN) Task. Across 32 AtN trials, each feature of interest (including number) appeared on alternate trials only, to prevent perseverative responding across consecutive trials. [“Number” was replaced by the feature “location” on alternate trials; for brevity, only Number trials are reported here, but both trials types were analyzed to evaluate unique properties of Number.] After selecting all 32 “best matches” (one per trial), examiners revisited trials so children could indicate all possible matches.

We ran a 2 (Salience: High versus Low) × 3 (Grade: K, 1, or 2) ANOVA on how often children selected a “best match” based on Number. We replicated the main effect of salience F(1, 161) = 100.71, p<.001 (Table 1), found no effect of grade, p=.321, and found no interaction between salience and grade, p=.10. Results held whether analyses were based on initial+repeat trials. AtN performance was not positively correlated with executive function scores nor with math, but showed remarkably comparable effect sizes across ages.

Additional analyses concern whether susceptibility to effects of salience is related to math or EF, and what features of “Number” are unique relative to our five additional matching features. These findings challenge the notion of “spontaneous” focus on number on tasks where numerical features are not the sole prominent feature.

Authors

• Michele Mazzocco, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Lukowski, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emily R. Padrutt, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author