Studies On Time Estimation And Numerosity Estimation In Children With Mathematical Learning Difficulty

Time estimation,also called time representation,is to represent the change of physical time,biological time,history and individuals' life time.And numerosity estimation refers to transforming a non-numeric representation to a number magnitude representation.Therefore,this study was carried out from four experiments.Verbal time estimation tasks(VTE),time production tasks(TP),and time reproduction(TR)tasks were measured in children with mathematics learning disability and normal children to investigate the characteristics of time estimation in MD.Meanwhile,point estimation tasks were conducted to investigate the characteristics of numerosity estimation in MD.We discussed the A Theory of Magnitude(ATOM)by analyzing the relationships between the scores of time estimation and numerosity estimation.we drawn some conclusions as following:(1)Individuals with MD performed poorly on tasks of VTE and TP in accuracy and stability compared with normal children;(2)Compared with normal children,individuals with MD performed comparably to normal children on tasks of TR;(3)Individuals with MD overestimate the interval in tasks of VTE while underestimate the interval in tasks of TP;(4)Individuals with MD performed poorly on tasks of NE in accuracy compared with normal children;(5)The estimated accuracy of the number of third grade children was significantly lower than that of the sixth grade;(6)There was significant correlation between time production and numerosity estimation,therefore,we claimed the existence of a partially shared processing mechanism that underpins the processing of time and number.