Abstracts - Earli

in each transformation. Most of the children solved the "Box Game" task counting each one of theadded counters in the box. This kind of responses have been reported in many similar studies(Nunez, 1983; Fayol 1985, Parra & Saiz 1992, etc). Although these systematical responses, whenwritten numerals were presented in the task, some children prove more advanced solutions: theydetermined the number of counters added in one part of the transformation (most of the times, thesecond one) and complete the solution counting the rest of the elements, but recovering thequantity supported by the written form. These responses correspond with the ones described as thebeginning of the incorporation of cardinality concept in many research works (Maza, 1989,Fuelabrada, 1991, Lerner 1992, etc). Our study opens the discussion around two main ideas: a) thedesign of the experimental situations (even though they were studied in a didactic context) and theconditions they improve to get the best children’s responses; b) children ability to manage writtennumbers and to employee them in the understanding of the additive problem.The effects of domain expertise on reference searching with the PubMed online tool: anexperimental study.Nicolas Vibert, CNRS - Universite Paris 5, FranceJean-Francois Rouet, CNRS - Universite de Poitiers, FranceChristine Ros, CNRS - Universite de Poitiers, FranceMelanie Ramond, CNRS - Universite de Poitiers, FranceJerome Gatefin, CNRS - Universite de Poitiers, FranceHigher level students and researchers in biology and medical sciences regularly use the PubMedonline search engine (http://www.pubmed.gov), which provides access to the MEDLINEbibliographic database. Despite a lack of formal training to this tool, PubMed has become the goldstandard of French neuroscientists for work-related information seeking. Sixteen neuroscienceexperts of doctorate level or above were asked to perform 5 bibliographic search tasks on varioustopics within their field of expertise. Objective measures and concomitant verbal protocols wereused to assess their behavior and performance. Despite a variable knowledge of the PubMedsearch tool, neuroscience experts were able to find and select in a limited time adequate referencesfor each task. Sixteen expert biologists of matched professional experience, who were regularusers of PubMed but not integrative neuroscience specialists, were asked to perform the samesearch tasks. Despite their lack of knowledge in neuroscience, as demonstrated by their slower andmore frequent reading of the instructions for the tasks, non-expert researchers could find and selectadequate references with the same efficiency as neuroscience experts. However, differences wereobserved between the way experts and non experts proceeded, as exemplified by the larger numberof keywords included in the requests to PubMed by non-experts. These data suggest that a highlevel expertise in a broad scientific field like biology can compensate for an often superficialknowledge of online information search tools, even if the participants are not specialists of thespecific domain in which references are searched for. For well-defined reference search tasks inneuroscience, a minimal experience in using PubMed and/or online search tools can compensatefor the absence of expertise in neuroscience. However, the mistakes made by high-levelresearchers using PubMed stress the need for inclusion of formal training to online search toolswithin higher education programs.– 216 –