Numeric skills

Prof. Orly Rubinsten’s laboratory houses wide-scale research on numeracy, addressing topics that include  numerical cognition, ordinality, developmental dyscalculia (DD), and math anxiety. Dr. Rubinstein is continuing her research on developmental patterns of the numerical Stroop effect (i.e., size congruity effect). She has shown that over developmental time, children shift from controlled and effortful to more automatic processing of numerical magnitudes. She is further studying the role of executive functions in numerical cognition, together with or beyond magnitude processing. Dr. Rubinsten has also developed diagnostic tools to assess ordinal processing and math anxiety. The latter is assessed through a novel implicit affective arithmetic priming task. She has found that for adult females as well as young children with developmental dyscalculia, negative affective primes impair the ability to solve simple arithmetic problems.

Using the superior temporal resolution of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), Prof. Rubinsten and her students have shown that the cognitive ordinality task developed in their lab can act as an effective scientific research tool. These studies provide preliminary data indicating that this experimental tool can be used to dissociate ordinality from numerosity.

Prof. Rubinsten’ s work in the field of math anxiety is pioneering: it is among the first to trace a direct link between cognition, emotion, and low achievements in math.

The novel suggestion is that some of the cognitive traits associated with general anxiety, such as the tendency to display attentional bias toward negative information, are involved not only in general anxiety but also in math anxiety. Math anxiety might also be viewed as a stimulus- and situation-specific anxiety.