Research About Mechanism Of Calibration Between Numer Representation Systems

Number processing is a very important field in psychology. Human adults are thought to possess two systems to represent numbers:a verbal system capable of representing numbers exactly and an approximate quantity system similar to a mental number line. Many researchers have done many in-depth studies on the two systems respectively. However, the study of their relation is insufficient now. The team of Professor Dehaene has studied the relationship between the two systems since 2008. They found that there existed interaction between the two systems, and the system representing numbers exactly could calibrate the approximate quantity system. But there are still many related questions should be researched deeply. How much information is needed for the calibration? How the calibration of the system representing numbers exactly happened in the mental number line? Furthermore, would the calibration be a global or local process? And does calibration work along the mental number line or it also can work in the opposite direction? So we designed four experiments to investigate these questions.In our experiments, it was found that:(1)When the range of the numerosity is from 1 to 100, the estimation did not improve when subjects are told the range of the numerosity.(2) In the numerosity estimation experiment, the inducer significantly influenced calibration. The estimations were more exact in the overestimated inducer group than in the underestimated group.(3)In the approximate quantity system, calibration happened both in the direction of rightness and in the opposite of the mental number line, which was a global process. (4)In the overestimated group, the bigger the distance between the inducer and the actual value, more exacter the estimations became.