Early Spatial Cognition and the Neural Basis of Mathematics in Children

Our research program identifies the systems that support mathematics learning during early childhood – a foundational issue in the fields of cognitive development and cognitive neuroscience. By using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) in longitudinal studies of 4- to 8-year-old children, we will assess, for the first time, how children’s early neural representations of spatial-numerical concepts relate to their subsequent mathematical competence in school. We predict that children’s early neural activations predict their growth in calculation abilities. Our proposal examines whether patterns of neural development generalize across children. Some behavioral evidence suggests that mathematics development in boys and girls is largely similar whereas other evidence suggests asymmetries. The current proposal will evaluate similarities and differences in the mathematics development of boys and girls. The reason this is important is because prior research in this area is extremely limited, prior methods and statistical techniques were flawed, and the prior evidence is mixed. We will address prior flaws in this research area by using rigorous new statistical methods, and we will investigate these questions at the neural level which provides new data on patterns of similarity and difference. We then examine the connection between children’s neural development and behavior, socialization, and learning activities. Based on previous research and our preliminary data, we hypothesize that boys and girls are largely similar in the cognitive and neural mechanisms, and that differences only emerge at later ages in narrow tasks, depending on children’s experiences. Our research brings new theoretical distinctions, innovative methods, and new neural data to a long-standing behavioral research tradition on the development of mathematics. The hypotheses, experiments, and analyses that we propose are all well-founded in prior research but also offer novel insights with broad significance for psychology, neuroscience, and education.