Abstract

According to the dominant view in the literature, several numerical cognition phenomena are explained coherently and parsimoniously by the Approximate Number System model, which supposes the existence of an evolutionarily old, simple representation behind many numerical tasks. We offer an alternative account that proposes that only nonsymbolic numbers are processed by the ANS, while symbolic numbers, which are more essential to human mathematical capabilities, are processed by the Discrete Semantic System. In the DSS, symbolic numbers are stored in a network of nodes, similar to conceptual or linguistic networks. The benefit of the DSS model and the benefit of the more general hybrid ANS–DSS framework are demonstrated using the crucial example of the distance and size effects of comparison tasks.