Competing Biases in Mental Arithmetic
- Mental arithmetic exhibits various biases. Among those is a tendency to overestimate addition and to underestimate subtraction outcomes. Does such “operational momentum” (OM) also affect multiplication and division? Twenty-six adults produced lines whose lengths corresponded to the correct outcomes of multiplication and division problems shown in symbolic format. We found a reliable tendency to over-estimate division outcomes, i.e., reverse OM. We suggest that anchoring on the first operand (a tendency to use this number as a reference for further quantitative reasoning) contributes to cognitive biases in mental arithmetic.
| Author details: | Samuel ShakiORCiD, Martin H. FischerORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00037 |
| ISSN: | 1662-5161 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Frontiers in human neuroscience |
| Subtitle (English): | When Division Is More and Multiplication Is Less |
| Publisher: | Frontiers Research Foundation |
| Place of publishing: | Lausanne |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first publication: | 2017/02/01 |
| Publication year: | 2017 |
| Release date: | 2017/02/22 |
| Tag: | heuristics and biases; mental arithmetic; mental number line; numerical cognition; operational momentum |
| Volume: | 11 |
| Funding institution: | Universität Potsdam, Publikationsfonds |
| Funding number: | PA 2017_04 |
| Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften |
| DDC classification: | 6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Grantor: | Publikationsfonds der Universität Potsdam |
| Publishing method: | Open Access |
| License (German): |  CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |
| External remark: | Zweitveröffentlichung in der Schriftenreihe Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe ; 312 |
