Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The number line placement task, in which individuals are presented with a target number and mark where it would belocated along a number line, has played an important role in the investigation of numerical cognition. However, recentwork suggests that different factors may influence performance on the task, making it a poor proxy for mental represen-tation of number. In this study, adults completed a computer-based number line placement task with either standard ornon-standard endpoints. Consistent with previous research, responses in the standard condition were best fit by a linearmodel, while responses in the non-standard condition were best fit by a logarithmic model. In addition, eye-trackingdata revealed different looking patterns between conditions, including greater fixations on and more frequent alternationbetween endpoints in the non-standard condition and a leftward bias in the standard condition. This behavior may reflectdifferences in number familiarity and strategy use.