Attentional strategies during mental arithmetic

Journal of Vision. 2021. Vol. 21. No. 9. Article 2539.

Bachurina V., Arsalidou M.

Eye-tracking is widely used in research of attentional strategies in tasks with visual representations. Strategies improve with learning and many have examined differences in attention allocation between experts and novices. Research show that when math problems are presented on the screen with response options, novices fixated more on response options that included distractors, whereas experts fixated more on the math problem and the correct answer. If experts and novices apply their attention on different parts of the scree these strategy differences would also be observable when comparing high and low performers. Participants (N = 26; 20-30 years), were non-math university majors who completed the Parametric Math Task (PMT; Konopkina, 2019) while their eye movements were recorded in a remote head-free-to-move mode. The PMT contains mathematical problems of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with three levels of difficulty. Individuals who scored above median were high performers and below were considered as low performers. Data were analyzed by evaluating dwell time (total duration of fixation) to the math problem area (top of screen) and response options areas (bottom of screen). Results showed that high performers and low performers were significantly different in their dwell times for two interest areas: problem area and distractor responses (problem area: p = 0.029, Cohen's d = 0.92; distractor responses: p = 0.018, Cohen's d = 0.99) ... Findings indicate that high performers spent significantly more time on the math problem area of ​​the screen whereas low performers spent more time on distractor options. In educational practice,

Keywords: eye tracking, mathematical operations, attentional strategies

Publication based on the results of: Neurocognitive mechanisms of individual differences in mathematical cognition in children (2021)