The Numerical Presentation Of Abacus-based Mental Calculation And Its Training Effects On Magnitude Processing In Children

Human beings are born with the ability of learning, which is the basis of human development. Learning is a course that individual repeats a practice or experience in a specifically instance, and the course can make the behavior, ability or tendency of the human change for long. Actually, the process of learning is a continuously process of practice or learning toward a given procedure. Abacus-based mental calculation(AMC) is a method of calculation that users can calculate by manipulating a imagery abacus in the brain. The imagery abacus was formed in the brain of AMC trainees after a long period of training. The training can make people calculate rapidly and exactly without the help of any actual tools. Comparing to traditional mental calculations, the tasks that the AMC processed are more complex, rapid and nicety. The functional magnetic image(fMRI) studies, which concerned the spatial dimension have found that the AMC trainees represent numbers by an imagery abacus in the brain. The present study attempts to explore the ability of numerical cognition of children from the temporal dimension after a long term AMC training, by adopting the event-related potentials(ERP) technology.This study was composed of three parts. The first part investigated the notion effect and the influence to the magnitude processing after long term AMC practice. Children that accepted about2and4years’AMC trainings participated in the experiment, and they were asked to compare numbers to5with numbers in different notations. In the second part, we investigated the automatic process to Arabic numbers and abacus numbers of children after AMC trainings by adopting the numerical Stroop paradigm. In the third part,we investigated the changes of the mathematics ability and the relation between executive function and mathematics ability of children after about two years’training of AMC.The main findings of our study were as follows:(1) We found the notation effect and distance effect in the Chinese children when they process magnitudes; the distance effect of the magnitude was universal and notation-dependent; the practice of AMC didn’t make the distance effect disappear or change dramatically.(2) The Chinese children can process Arabic numbers automatically in the second grade; the strategy of number processing of the children changed after about2years’ AMC trainings; children have developed a direct connection between the abacus beads and magnitudes, and they processed the abacus numbers automatically after4years’AMC trainings.(3) The mathematics ability of the AMC group was significantly different from the control; the AMC children and the control both showed the spatial compatibility effect; the ability of inhibition to the conflict attribute was tend to be decreased after about2years’ AMC trainings; the ability of transfer between tasks was related a lot to the AMC trainings for the AMC children.