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Children rely on their approximate number system (ANS) to guess quantities from a young age. Studies have shown that older children displayed better ANS performance. However, previous research did not provide an explanation for this ANS improvement. We show that children’s development in ANS is primarily driven by improved attentional control and awareness of peripheral information. Children guess the number of dots on a computer screen while being eye-tracked in our experiment. The behavioral and eye-tracking results provide supporting evidence for our account. Our analysis shows that children estimate better under the longer display-time condition and more visual foveation, with the effect of visual foveation mediating that of time. It also shows that older children make fewer underestimations because they are better at directing their attention and gaze toward areas of interest, and they are also more aware of dots in their peripheral vision. Our finding suggests that the development of children’s ANS is significantly impacted by the development of children’s nonnumerical cognitive abilities. 

The physical properties of space may be universal, but the way people conceptualize space is not. In some groups, people tend to use egocentric space (e.g. left, right) to encode the loca- tions of objects, while in other groups, people encode the same spatial scene using allocentric space (e.g. upriver, downriver). These different spatial Frames of Reference (FoRs) character- ize the way people talk about spatial relations and the way they think about them, even when they are not using language. Al- though spatial language and spatial thinking tend to covary, the root causes of this variation are unclear. Here we propose that this variation in FoR use reflects the spatial discriminability of the relevant spatial continua. In an initial test of this proposal in a group of indigenous Bolivians, we compared FoR use across spatial axes that are known to differ in discriminabil- ity. In two non-verbal tests, participants spontaneously used different FoRs on different spatial axes: On the lateral axis, where egocentric (left-right) discrimination is difficult, their behavior was predominantly allocentric; on the sagittal axis, where egocentric (front-back) discrimination is relatively easy, their behavior was predominantly egocentric. These findings support the spatial discriminability hypothesis, which may ex- plain variation in spatial concepts not only across axes, but also across groups, between individuals, and over development.