The Young Child's Processing of Dot Patterns: A Chronometric and Eye Movement Analysis

The present study reports the measurement of response latencies and the recording of eye movement in a task where children of about 5.5 years had to count arrangements of 1-8 dots in different configurations. Consistent with earlier findings, response latencies for numbers up to 5 suggested subitizing rather than counting strategies. Data from concomittant eye movement recordings clearly showed that even the processing of the small numbers required at least four fixations per response. Records of eye movements under the conditions of numbers of dots larger than n = 5 were found to reflect mixed strategies and not elementary one-by-one counting procedures. It is hypothesized that large processing times in comparison with adults were mainly due to interim verifications of results already established: children were, much more than adults, mentally loaded by the double task of storing partial results and processing new information at the same time.