When asked to write the numbers from one to ten in a sequence, how do you order them? Horizontally? Vertically? Left to right? Top to bottom? Would you place them randomly?
It has been often been assumed, and taught in schools in Western countries, that the “correct” ordering of numbers is from left to right (1, 2, 3, 4…) rather than right to left (10, 9, 8, 7…). The ordering of numbers along a horizontal dimension is known as a “mental number line” and describes an important way we represent number and quantity in space.
