Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several researchers have proposed that skilled adults may solve single-digit addition problems (e.g. 3+1=4, 4+3=7)using a fast counting procedure. Practicing a procedure often leads to transfer of learning and faster performance of unpracticeditems. Such transfer has been demonstrated using a counting-based alphabet arithmetic task (e.g., B+4 = C D E F) that indicatedrobust RT gains when untrained transfer problems at test had been implicitly practiced (e.g., practice B+3, test B+2 or B+1).Here we constructed analogous simple addition problems (practice 4+3, test 4+2 or 4+1). In three experiments (n=108) therewas no evidence of generalization for these items, but there was robust speed up when the items were repeated. The results areconsistent with direct retrieval of addition facts from long-term memory rather than a counting procedure.