Mathematical cognition requires coordinated activity across multiple brain regions, leading to the emergence of resting-state functional connectivity as a method for studying the neural basis of differences in mathematical achievement. Hyper-connectivity of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a key locus of mathematical and numerical processing, has…

A long-standing debate in the field of numerical cognition concerns the degree to which symbolic and non-symbolic processing are related over the course of development. Of particular interest is the possibility that this link depends on the range of quantities in question. Behavioral and neuroimaging research with adults suggests that symbolic and…

A large and growing body of work has documented robust illusions of area perception in adults. To date, however, there has been surprisingly little in-depth investigation into children's area perception, despite the importance of this topic to the study of quantity perception more broadly (and to the many studies that have been devoted to studying…

Young children can quickly and intuitively represent the number of objects in a visual scene through the Approximate Number System (ANS). The precision of the ANS--indexed as the most difficult ratio of two numbers that children can reliably discriminate--is well known to improve with development: whereas infants require relatively large ratios to…

Although growing evidence suggests a link between children's math skills and their ability to estimate numerical quantities using the approximate number system (ANS), little is known about the sources underlying individual differences in ANS acuity and their relation with specific mathematical skills. To examine the role of intergenerational…

Human children possess the ability to approximate numerical quantity nonverbally from a young age. Over the course of early childhood, children develop increasingly precise representations of numerical values, including a symbolic number system that allows them to conceive of numerical information as Arabic numerals or number words. Functional…

We determined the relative importance of the so-called approximate number system (ANS), symbolic number comparison (SNC) and verbal and spatial short-term and working memory (WM) capacity for mathematics achievement in 1,254 Grade 2, 4 and 6 children. The large sample size assured high power and low false report probability and allowed us to…

A growing body of evidence suggests that non-symbolic representations of number, which humans share with nonhuman animals, are functionally related to uniquely human mathematical thought. Other research suggesting that numerical and non-numerical magnitudes not only share analog format but also form part of a general magnitude system raises…

The integrated theory of numerical development posits that a central theme of numerical development from infancy to adulthood is progressive broadening of the types and ranges of numbers whose magnitudes are accurately represented. The process includes four overlapping trends: (1) representing increasingly precisely the magnitudes of non-symbolic…

The study assessed the relations among acuity of the inherent approximate number system (ANS), performance on measures of symbolic quantitative knowledge, and mathematics achievement for a sample of 138 (64 boys) preschoolers. The Weber fraction (a measure of ANS acuity) and associated task accuracy were significantly correlated with mathematics…

Previous research shows a correlation between individual differences in people's school math abilities and the accuracy with which they rapidly and nonverbally approximate how many items are in a scene. This finding is surprising because the Approximate Number System (ANS) underlying numerical estimation is shared with infants and with non-human…

In the primate brain, sensory information is processed along two partially segregated cortical streams: the ventral stream, mainly coding for objects' shape and identity, and the dorsal stream, mainly coding for objects' quantitative information (including size, number, and spatial position). Neurophysiological measures indicate that such…

Newborn chicks were tested for their sensitivity to number vs. continuous physical extent of artificial objects they had been reared with soon after hatching. Because of the imprinting process, such objects were treated by chicks as social companions. We found that when the objects were similar, chicks faced with choices between 1 vs. 2 or 2 vs. 3…