A granny summary is a short summary of a study from our lab, written in a simple language that anyone can read and understand – including my grandmother, who knew nothing about research and cognition. All summaries follow the same simple rule: 5 minutes of reading, zero complicated words.
Unlike academic abstracts, a granny summary does not always focus on the findings that researchers in the relevant domain would find most interesting. Rather, it focuses on what we think would be most interesting to non-expert readers.
You will find below also the links to the full articles (only those for which a granny summary exists). For a full list of the studies from our lab, check out the publications page.
Reading and writing numbers
Theoretical overview. Which cognitive processes enable us to read aloud multi-digit numbers? [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]. You can also watch this short YouTube that explains (in Hebrew) how we read numbers, and this one that explains how we write numbers.
Is this a big deal? How hard is it to read numbers, why is it hard, and how frequent are number-reading disorders (dysnumeria)? [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]
The visual parsing of digit strings when reading numbers. We have several studies that examined how precisely the visual analyzer of numbers operates:
- The visual analysis of numbers in Hebrew is challenging because numbers are written from left to right (like English) but words from right to left. Interestingly, despite this discrepancy, children’s visual analyzer is quite mature even by the fifth grade [Summary soon; here’s the preprint].
- How can we tell that the visual analyzer organizes the digits in hierarchy-like groups? [Article].
- How do we know that the visual analyzer is subject to top-down effects from the speech system? And why is this important? [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]
Do we represent the syntactic structure of numbers? The short answer is “yes”, but how do we know this, and how precisely does this work?
- People maintain a concrete represention of the syntactic structure of the whole number. To show this, we created two research methods: syntactic priming [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article] and syntactic chunking [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article].
- The cognitive representation of number syntax does not arise from the knowledge of number words or their meaning [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article].
- This line of work continues, mostly in Zohar’s MA and Noa’s PhD – stay tuned!
How precisely is short-term memory involved in auditory number comprehension? [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]
How do children learn to read numbers? It’s more difficult than we think – and it has a lot to do with learning the specific rules of number syntax [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]
What’s the difference between reading numbers and reading words?
- Does dyslexia disrupt number reading too, or just word reading? [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article / Hebrew article]
- What happens when people with letter position dyslexia read numbers? [Hebrew summary / Article]
- Why is it that people with a specific type of aphasia (speech disorder), which makes them say incorrect syllables when they talk, can still say numbers without making such errors? [Hebrew summary / Article / Hebrew article (the Hebrew version is a bit older and not as up-to-date)]
- Why does the brain have two separate cognitive systems – one to parse letter strings, one to parse digit strings? And how precisely does the visual analysis of digits work? [Summary / Article].
Learning and solving arithmetic facts
How should we teach the multiplication table? We examined this for people with dyscalculia [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article], and for first-grade children [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article].
Which learning disorders disrupt multiplication fact knowledge? See Maayan’s MA.
How do we perform simple, single-digit addition and subtraction? [Hebrew summary / Article] (a collaboration with Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas)
Understanding multi-digit numbers as quantities
This series of studies examined the cognitive process in which we see a multi-digit string and understand the quantity associated with this number. Each of the following “granny summaries” (and the corresponding study) focuses on a different aspect of this cognitive process:
1. How does the cognitive system represent the multi-digit quantities? [Hebrew summary / Article]?
2. What is the effect of the intrinsic impreciseness of our perception of quantities? [Hebrew summary / Article]
3. How does our brain implement the knowledge of the decimal systems, i.e., that decade digits are “worth” 10 times more than unit digits, hundreds 10 times more than decades, etc.? [Summary / Article]
4. Does our comprehension of multi-digit numbers depend on language? [Hebrew summary / Article / Hebrew article]
Other topics
How do we get a sense of confidence in our decisions? [Hebrew summary / Article]
How do we speak? The cognitive processes involved in speech [Hebrew summary / Article / Hebrew article] (review article)
How can scientists look into your brain just by tracking your finger? [Summary / Article] (a methodological article)
What is syntax and why is it important for math? [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]