Role of numerical competence in preschoolers' affective decision-making

The present study aims to examine the effect of preschoolers' numerical competence on their affective decision-making (ADM). Four numerical tasks (pointing count, estimating count, simple adding, and simple subtracting) and a standard child gambling task (CGT) have been administrated on 62 Chinese mandarin-speaking preschoolers (mean age = 55.69 months, range = 43 months to 65 months, 30 boys and 32 girls). The results demonstrate that the Pearson correlation between preschoolers' numerical competence and their ADM in each block of the CGT is significant, and the proportion advantageous minus the proportion disadvantageous from the preschoolers with better numerical competence is consistently higher than that from the preschoolers with poorer numerical competence in each block of the CGT, suggesting that better numerical competence will help preschoolers make more advantageous choices on the CGT. While the relation pattern in girls' performances is more obvious than that in boys'.