Cognitive Bias in Children’s Numerical Intuition

This study, conducted in collaboration with the Universidad de la República (UDELAR) in Montevideo, Uruguay, examines how whole-number bias interacts with the distance effect in numerical estimation. Nearly 100 Uruguayan students completed a three-minute nonsymbolic numerical estimation task designed using the 2-Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) paradigm. The task consisted of 40 items: half were designed to assess the distance effect (10 items with small distance and 10 items with large distance), while the other half were designed to test cognitive bias (10 congruent items and 10 incongruent items).

By analyzing students' performance scores in incongruent and large-distance tasks, we identified biased and unbiased groups of participants. Results reveal that most students in the biased group are first graders, whereas most students in the unbiased group are third graders. The distinction between these groups is described in terms of their performance on congruent items and how the distance effect modulates their responses.

To further characterize students' decision-making processes in the 2AFC task, performance was decomposed into interpretable parameters using the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM), and comparisons were conducted between the biased and unbiased groups. During my presentation, these findings will be discussed in the context of existing theoretical frameworks on numerical cognition.

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