Loughborough University is a top-ten rated university in England for research intensity (REF2014) and an outstanding 66% of the work of Loughborough’s academic staff who were eligible to be submitted to the REF was judged as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, compared to a national average figure of 43%. In choosing Loughborough for your research, you’ll work alongside academics who are leaders in their field. You will benefit from comprehensive support and guidance from our Doctoral College, including tailored careers advice, to help you succeed in your research and future career. The dominant account in the numerical cognition literature suggests that numerical symbols gain meaning by being mapped onto nonsymbolic magnitude representations generated by a so-called ‘approximate number system’. For instance, the symbol ‘7’ is said to be associated with the intuitive sense you get when you see an array of seven objects. However, a number of recent research findings call into question this proposal, and alternative approaches are now being actively developed. The goal of this project is to investigate how structural features of number notations – such as ordinality or place value – support the development of numerical meaning. The idea behind such approaches is that the symbol ‘7’ gains its meaning by its associations with other symbols, such as ‘6’, ‘8’ and ‘17’. A number of different research approaches may be used to tackle this question. For example, recent work in the Mathematical Cognition Group at Loughborough has used artificial symbol learning paradigms to investigate the role of ordinality and cardinality in number knowledge development. Some other recent projects on this topic in our group have involved working with young children encountering symbolic numbers for the first time. The exact approach adopted during this project will depend on the interests of the successful applicant.