Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies including Ramani and Siegler (2008) haveshown that playing a number board game improved studentsperformance on several numerical tasks, including numeralidentification, magnitude comparison, counting and numberline estimation. However, the computational mechanismunderlying such number sense acquisition remains unclear.Here, we aim to fill this gap by building a model thatsimulates play of the game as well as the basic numericaltasks. We hypothesize that cognitive components that areused in the basic tasks are recruited to work together whenchildren play the game, so that the learning induced byplaying the game also manifests itself in those tasks. Wereproduced the empirical findings with a neural network modelimplementing our hypothesis. This computational approachdemonstrates how a single model that coordinates componentsof number processing in different modalities (visual, languageand spatially-guided action) can explain the number senseacquisition in number board game playing.