Are Individual Differences in Arithmetic Fact Retrieval in Children Related to Inhibition?

Although it has been proposed that inhibition is related to individual differences in mathematical achievement, it is not clear how it is related to specific aspects of mathematical skills, such as arithmetic fact retrieval. The present study therefore investigated the association between inhibition and arithmetic fact retrieval and further examined the unique role of inhibition in individual differences in arithmetic fact retrieval, in addition to numerical magnitude processing. We administered measures of cognitive inhibition (i.e., numerical and non-numerical stroop tasks) and a complementary, more ecologically valid measure of children’s inhibition in the classroom (i.e., teacher questionnaire), as well as numerical magnitude processing (i.e., symbolic and non-symbolic numerical magnitude comparison) and arithmetic fact retrieval (i.e., two verification tasks) in 86 typically developing third graders. We used a correlation, a regression and a Bayesian analysis. This study failed to observe a significant association between inhibition and arithmetic fact retrieval. Consequently, our results did not reveal a unique contribution of inhibition to arithmetic fact retrieval in addition to numerical magnitude processing. On the other hand, symbolic numerical magnitude processing turned out to be a very powerful predictor of arithmetic fact retrieval, as indicated by both frequentist and Bayesian approaches.

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