ABSTRACT

The basic idea of the present research was that if a mental dynamic system is involved in representing numbers, it is possible that its behaviour will have some stability in time and some individual characteristics. The assumption of the present research is that these could be reflected in a task of free number generation, specifically one in which the length of the required series was of 500, each number being a positive integer between 1 and 9. The study had two sessions, and 41 first-year university students participated in it. Our results suggest that the level of the self-similarity present in a numeric series generated in a totally uncontrolled, free manner by a participant, and the characteristic average fluctuations on the majority of the considered scales tend to be preserved at least for a month. They could suggest some individual characteristics regarding the dynamics of participant�s mental numeric representations.

KEYWORDS: mental dynamics, 1/f noise, free number generation, individual differences, detrended fluctuation analysis.

PAGES: 327-336