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]
Number reading: the visual parsing of digit strings. We ran several studies to understand how precisely this visual process operates.
- Why does the brain have 2 separate systems to parse letters and digits, and how precisely does the visual parsing work? [Summary / Article].
- How can we tell that the visual analyzer, which parses the digits, organizes them in hierarchy-like groups? [Article; the granny summary will be added soon].
- How do we know that the visual processing of digit strings is not autonomous but it is subject to top-down effect from the speech system? And why is this important? [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]
Do we represent the syntactic structure of numbers? We ran a series of studies to show that the answer to this question is “yes”, and also show how this works. In one study we used a method called syntactic priming to show that people actually represent the syntax of numbers [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]. In another study we used a method called syntactic chunking to the same point, but also to start understanding how people create the syntactic representation of numbers [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]. In a third study, we showed that the cognitive representation of number syntax does not depend on numerical semantics or on the knowledge of number words [Summary / Hebrew summary / Article]. This line of work continues – stay tuned!
Reading numbers versus 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 attempt reading 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 (a bit older, not as up-to-date)]
Performing arithmetic calculations
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].
How do we perform simple 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)