AUTHOR=Lonnemann Jan, Linkersdörfer Janosch, Nagler Telse, Hasselhorn Marcus, Lindberg Sven TITLE=Spatial representations of numbers and letters in children JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=4 YEAR=2013 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00544 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00544 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=Different lines of evidence suggest that children's mental representations of numbers are spatially organized in form of a mental number line. It is, however, still unclear whether a spatial organization is specific for the numerical domain or also applies to other ordinal sequences in children. In the present study, children (n = 129) aged 8–9 years were asked to indicate the midpoint of lines flanked by task-irrelevant digits or letters. We found that the localization of the midpoint was systematically biased toward the larger digit. A similar, but less pronounced, effect was detected for letters with spatial biases toward the letter succeeding in the alphabet. Instead of assuming domain-specific forms of spatial representations, we suggest that ordinal information expressing relations between different items of a sequence might be spatially coded in children, whereby numbers seem to convey this kind of information in the most salient way.