An open source software application to study numerical representations in children and adults

Information technologies have strongly improved psychological research, contributing to speed up the progress of knowledge in this field. Unfortunately, for many years, most part of software solutions for psychological research were very expensive and distributed with proprietary licenses, but open source applications may solve these difficulties. This work applies an open source software developed in Python using the module PyshcoPy, with the aim to study numerical representations in children and adults: we transformed in a computer-based test the paper-and-pencil version of the Number Line Task (NLT), which requires to estimate the position of several digits along a line. Paper-and-pencil and computer versions of the NLT were compared submitting the task to different ages groups, analyzing individuals’ performances and response’s variability: results indicated that there were not significant differences between the two versions of NLT task in children’s and adults’ percentage of absolute errors (PAE) and in responses’ variability. We concluded that there were not significant differences between the classical NLT version and the open source NLT software to assess the cognitive representation of numerical magnitude; however, differently to the paper-and-pencil task, the computer program allows to record data with a great decimal precision, to record reaction times, to decrease monetary and environmental costs (paper) and to avoid human errors in data entry.