Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent evidence suggests that non-mathematical world knowledge influences the semantic encoding of arithmetic wordproblems (Gamo, Sander & Richard, 2010; Gros, Thibaut & Sander, 2017). We used isomorphic problems that couldbe encoded in two distinct ways to investigate this issue. Depending on the world knowledge evoked by the elementsdescribed in the problem statement, we made the hypothesis that different mathematical relations would be made salient inthe encoded representation. We tested this hypothesis by presenting participants with an unexpected problem recognitiontask following a problem solving task. Participants tended to erroneously recognize modified problems in the recognitiontask when they had been rewritten so as to explicitly describe the relation that could have been inferred from worldknowledge, but not when the world knowledge evoked during the encoding did not make this relation salient. Thishighlights the crucial influence of world knowledge on arithmetic word problems representations.