How do individual differences in children's brain mechanism for number abilities relate to gains during first grade mathematics, and how might first grade instruction drive changes in such brain mechanisms? These questions are addressed using a battery of brain imaging measures including brain structure (MRI,DTI), bloodflow changes (fMRI), and electrical responses (ERP). Pre-post brain measures track changes over the course of a school year within two groups segregated by a "school's cutoff date" into young first graders and old kindergarteners. This group contrast allows the impact of first grade instruction to be differentiated from maturation and school attendance.
This project examined changes that occur in children's brain activity that enables the emergence of mathematical competence over the early years of elementary school, including changes that occur in their representations of basic number concepts and abilities including: precision in assessing/comparing approximate numerosity of sets of objects, subitizing ability, counting skills, use of grouping information to reason about sets, and abilities to add and subtract both symbolic and non-symbolic values. Central findings indicate that basic number representations undergoe profound changes as children progress from Kindergarten through 3rd Grade. First, our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of brain activity in children indicate that brain responses to number symbols change dramatically from Kindergarten through 3rd Grade in a way that suggests the link between brain regions that recognize the visual form of number symbols begin to systematically link to brain systems that represent the precise numerical value of these symbols. These changes are in turn linked in important ways to mathematical development, as revealed by a correlations between changes in brain activity and performance on standardized measures of children's math performance. Additional findings link these developments in brain responses to number symbols to the development of children's early intuitve abilities to represent approximate values of sets of objects, suggesting a link between children's early intutions about numerosity and later success in formal instruction in mathematics.
