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From the abstract (full text requires subscription): "Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of information, guided by abstract knowledge, to form rational expectations about novel situations, never directly experienced. Here, we show that this reasoning is surprisingly rich, powerful, and coherent even in preverbal infants. When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables. Infants' looking times are consistent with a Bayesian ideal observer embodying abstract principles of object motion. The model explains infants' statistical expectations and classic qualitative findings about object cognition in younger babies, not originally viewed as probabilistic inferences."

Description of a University of Queensland study involving 36 infants, half 15 months and half 18 months. Tests with counting videos suggests that the 18 month old children have a grasp of counting rules before they can count (for example, understanding that objects can be counted only once." Further research using brain imaging is suggested.

Thanks - this will be useful for my "Math-rich baby" online class!

Numbers in the brain, including those of animals and infants, neurons and brain areas involved in mathematical calculations, synthesis of recent research

One of my favorite books!

University of Delaware researchers find: "Even [when their children are] as young as 22 months, American parents draw boys' attention to numerical concepts far more often than girls'. Indeed, parents speak to boys about number concepts twice as often as they do girls. For cardinal-numbers speech, in which a number is attached to an obvious noun reference - "Here are five raisins" or "Look at those two beds" - the difference was even larger. Mothers were three times more likely to use such formulations while talking to boys."

"If a 6-month-old can distinguish between 20 dots and 10 dots, she's more likely to be a good at math in preschool. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that part of our proficiency at addition and subtraction may simply be something we're born with."

A five-year NSF backed study suggests early interventions in teaching and learning

Sending this on to the UMIGO group - we are involving parents of low-income kids with tech&math...