Cognitive Arithmetic: Evidence for the Development of Automaticity.

To determine whether children's knowledge of arithmetic facts becomes increasingly "automatic" with age, 7-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults were given a number-matching task for which mental arithmetic should have been irrelevant. Specifically, students were required to verify the presence of a probe number in a previously presented pair (e.g., 5+1 followed by 5). Eleven-year-olds and adults were slower to reject a probe that was the sum of the initial pair (e.g., 5+1 and 6) than to reject a probe that was not the sum (e.g., 5+1 and 3). This finding indicates that, in older children and adults, obligatory activation of a sum interferes with a required response. No evidence for obligatory activation was found for 7-year-olds. These results tend to be consistent with current models of arithmetic knowledge, and they suggest that one aspect of the development of arithmetic skill is the automatic retrieval of stored facts. (Author/TW)