All About Dots

"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 reported in Wired.com which finds that part of our proficiency at addition and subtraction may simply be something we’re born with.

Researchers have long wondered where our math skills come from.  Are they innate, or should we credit studying and good teachers — or some combination of the two?  To investigate this, researchers recruited 48 6-month-old infants to briefly join them in the lab.  The researchers showed the babies opposing images of two sets of dots that flashed before them on a screen.  One side of the screen always contained 10 dots, which were arranged in various patterns.  The other side alternated between 10 and 20 dots, also arranged in various patterns.  The team tracked the infants’ gaze — a common method for judging infant cognition — to see which set of dots they preferred to watch.  Babies prefer to look at new things to old things, so the pattern of dots that flashed between arrays of 10 and 20 should appear more interesting to infants because the dots were changing not just in position, but in number.  Both screens changed dot position simultaneously, so in theory, the flashing pattern changes were equally distracting.  If an infant indicated that she picked up on the difference in dot numbers by preferentially staring at the 10- and 20-dot side of the screen, the researchers concluded that her intuitive number sense was at work.

To see how, if at all, the infants’ intuitive number sense related to their math ability later in life, 3 years later, the researchers invited those same babies to return to the lab.  The team asked the children to complete a set of standardized tests that measure math ability, intuitive number sense, understanding of number words, and general intelligence.  Children who performed in the top 50% of the math achievement test had a significantly higher intuitive number sense in infancy than those who performed in the bottom 50%, the authors found. This relationship held true even when the researchers controlled for general intelligence.

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