People overlook subtractive changes differently depending on age, culture, and task

Previous work has explored transformative strategies that adds or removes components to change an original structure or state, and showed that adults tend to search for additive solutions far more often than subtractive ones. In the current study, we replicated a Lego building task and a grid-based symmetry task from a previous study, and also introduced a novel digital puzzle task. We investigated limitations in the previous study as well as extended the investigation of the subtraction neglect in a sample of children and across two cultures. Results partially confirm previous results, and extends the literature by showing that 9–10 year old children were more likely to ignore subtractive transformations than adults. However, we found both task-based and cultural variations in strategy use in adults from Sweden and the USA. We conclude that a subtraction neglect involves complex cognitive processes that are dependent on the task, culture, and age.