Infants' Primitive Number Sense Linked with Future Math Scores

Early ability to differentiate between large and small groups could be a sign that the child will get better scores in math, a new study has found.

Researchers at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences say that children might have rudimentary knowledge of math and this innate numerical sense helps them grasp higher-level math at school.

"When children are acquiring the symbolic system for representing numbers and learning about math in school, they're tapping into this primitive number sense," said Elizabeth Brannon, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and neuroscience, lead author of the study, according to a news release. "It's the conceptual building block upon which mathematical ability is built."

An adult will know that a group of 20 apples is greater than a group of five apples, even without actually counting them. Researchers in the present study argue that this ability to understand large and small groups is present since birth.

The study, they say, will help target children who have trouble with math and help them learn basic numerical concepts.

Researchers conducted several experiments to see if infants could differentiate between higher and lower number of objects. In one such test, they placed 6-month-old babies in front of two screens. Kids take a lot of interest looking at new objects, so researchers showed them series of dots on the monitors. In one of the monitors the number of dots remained constant, while in others it kept changing. Gaze-tracking devices showed that infants looked longer at screen showing varying numbers of dots.

The same set of infants was given a math test when they were about 3.5 years old. Researchers found that kids with higher preference for changing group numbers during infancy had higher scores in math later in life.

"We can't measure a baby's number sense ability at 6 months and know how they'll do on their SATs," Brannon added. "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."

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.