Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Numerical tasks with Arabic numerals involve the integration of internal and external information and the interaction between perception and cognition. 2-digit number comparison task was selected to study these integration and interaction processes. To compare the magnitudes of two 2digit Arabic numerals, we can (1) compare them digitbydigit sequentially, (2) compare corresponding digits in parallel, or (3) encode them as an integrated representation and compare the whole numerical values. Previous studies showed that 2- digit comparison was holistic when target numerals were compared with a standard held in memory. In our experiment target numerals and standards were presented on the same external display at the same time. Instead of a holistic comparison, we found that 2-digit comparison was a combination of sequential and parallel comparisons. The implications of this discrepancy were discussed in terms of the interplay between perception and cognition.