Baby's innate number sense predicts math skills | Futurity - 0 views
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Rebecca Patterson on 28 Oct 13"When children are acquiring the symbolic system for representing numbers and learning about math in school, they're tapping into this primitive number sense," says Elizabeth Brannon, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, who led the study. "It's the conceptual building block upon which mathematical ability is built." Understanding how infants and young children conceptualize and understand number can lead to the development of new mathematics education strategies, says psychology and neuroscience graduate student Ariel Starr. In particular, this knowledge can be used to design interventions for young children who have trouble learning mathematics symbols and basic methodologies. "Our study shows that infant number sense is a predictor of symbolic math," Brannon says. "We believe that when children learn the meaning of number words and symbols, they're likely mapping those meanings onto pre-verbal representations of number that they already have in infancy," she says. "In fact our infant task only explains a small percentage of the variance in young children's math performance. But our findings suggest that there is cognitive overlap between primitive number sense and symbolic math. These are fundamental building blocks."
