Ending up with less: the role of working memory in solving simple subtraction problems with positive and negative answers
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Does solving subtraction problems with negative answers (e.g., 5–14) require different cognitive processes than solving problems with positive answers (e.g., 14–5)? In a dual-task experiment, young adults (N=39) combined subtraction with two working memory tasks, verbal memory and visual-spatial memory. All of the subtraction problems required verbal working memory but only large problems with negative answers (e.g., 8–17) required visual-spatial working memory. Small-operand problems (e.g., 5–3) required less verbal working memory than large-operand problems (e.g., 15–9). Answers to small problems were probably retrieved from memory even when the answer was negative (e.g., 3–5). In contrast, large problems with negative answers may have required participants to modify their solution procedures such that problem difficulty increased. These results indicate that even relatively simple subtraction problems can be cognitively demanding of both verbal and visual-spatial working memory, especially when solutions are not activated automatically.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it