Infant's Innate Number Sense Predicts Future Math Skills, Study Claims

Infant's innate number sense is a predictor of symbolic math, suggests a new study. Researchers claim that an infant's inborn number sense can help predict its future mathematical abilities.

The study conducted by researchers at Duke University suggests that infants who can distinguish between large and small group items even before learning how to count are more likely to perform better in math. They believe that the rudimentary sense of numbers in infants is the foundation for higher level math understanding.

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

Babies are born with a basic understanding or a primitive number sense. When two different collections are placed before them, they identify the numerically larger set with the primitive number sense. Researchers say that understanding how infants get this number sense can help in developing interesting new mathematical educational strategies. This can also help those who have trouble learning basic math.

For this study the researchers analyzed 48 six months old infants. They tested the infants' primitive number sense by checking if they recognized the numerical changes. The babies were placed before two screens in which one had eight dots which just changed in size and position and in the second screen, the number of dots kept changing from eight to 16 in number. Those kids that could identify the difference between the two numerical values (8 and 16) looked longer at the numerically changing screen.

Later the researchers tested the same kids after 3.5 years. But this time it was a non symbolic number comparison game. They showed the kids two different arrays and were told to pick one that had more dots without counting them. Apart from this they had to complete a math test scaled for pre schoolers, including an IQ test.

The researchers discovered that the kids who had higher preference score for looking at the numerically changing screen had better primitive number sense three years later when compared to those kids who had lower scores. Similarly those kids with higher scores in infancy did well on standardized math tests.

"Our study shows that infant number sense is a predictor of symbolic math," Brannon said.

"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," Brannon's colleague, Duke Psychology and neuroscience graduate student Ariel Starr concluded.

The finding was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.