Numbers present an important part of our everyday life, therefore the development of arithmetic abilities has been studied for a long time. Modern imaging techniques enabled the research of relations between mathematical processes and the underlying brain processes. This has led to a better understanding of mathematical cognition, as well as problems and diseases encountered in learning, understanding and applying mathematics. Rather new research method is the eye movement analysis. We performed an experiment with an eye tracker device on two groups of adolescents: healthy and diagnosed with neonatal encephalopathy (NE). We analyzed the answer accuracy, the reaction time and the eye movements during the subtraction of two-digit numbers and simple equations solving. There were no significant differences between the studied groups in the accuracy of answers. The borrow problem in subtraction affected the accuracy only with healthy adolescents, while the position of the unknown x in the equation affected both groups. Adolescents with NE took longer to calculate, furthermore, the borrow problem affected the reaction time of both groups, but adolescents with NE less, and still, the position of x had an influence only on healthy adolescents. Neither the difference in subtraction nor the position of x affected the accuracy and reaction time of both groups. However, groups showed significant differences in eye movements. Adolescents with NE made more fixations but with shorter durations. They also made more blinks, their amplitudes of saccades were smaller and still, adolescents with NE had significantly smaller pupil sizes.
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