Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In two experiments, we investigate how adults think aboutproportion across different symbolic and spatialrepresentations in a comparison task (Experiment 1) and atranslation task (Experiment 2). Both experiments showresponse patterns suggesting that decimal notation provides asymbolic advantage in precision when representing numericalmagnitude, whereas fraction notation does not. In addition,pie charts may show some advantages above number lineswhen translating between representations. Lastly, our findingssuggest that the translation between number lines andfractions may be particularly error-prone. We discuss whatthese performance patterns suggest in terms of how adultsrepresent proportional information across these differentformats and some potential avenues through which theseadvantages and disadvantages may arise, suggesting newquestions for future work.