Preschoolers Inability to Estimate Quantity Relates to Later Maths Difficulties

Preschool children who showed less ability to estimate the number of objects in a group were 2.4 times more likely to have a later mathematical learning disability than other young people. 

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Preschool children who showed less ability to estimate the number of objects in a group were 2.4 times more likely to have a later mathematical learning disability than other young people, according to a team of University of Missouri psychologists.

Parents may be able to help their children develop their skills at approximating group sizes by emphasizing numerals while interacting with young children.

"Lacking skill at estimating group size may impede a child's ability to learn the concept of how numerals symbolize quantities and how those quantities relate to each other," said study co-author David Geary, professor of psychological sciences at MU.

"Not understanding the values numbers symbolize then leads to difficulties in math and problems in school, which our previous studies suggest may be related to later difficulties with employment."

Geary said that parents may be able to improve a child's innate skill at approximating group size and suggested that caregivers draw children's attention to quantities in everyday situations.

For example, after a preschool-aged child completes a series of tasks, a parent can ask the youth how many tasks they completed.

Kristy vanMarle

"Talking to children about how the world can be represented in numbers may help young people develop the ability to estimate the size of a group, which may prepare them for later mathematics education" said co-author Kristy vanMarle, assistant professor of psychological science at MU.

"Asking them 'how many' whenever they encounter a group of objects or images can help them understand that the world can be understood in terms of numbers."

However, the inability to approximate group size was not the only factor related to later math problems.

The MU team also found that preschoolers who lagged behind others in their understanding of the symbolic value of numerals and other related concepts were 3.6 to 4.5 times more likely to show mathematical learning difficulties, which corroborates earlier research by Geary, and extends it to a much younger age.

Doctoral student Felicia W. Chu was the lead author of the study, "Quantitative deficits of preschool children at risk for mathematical learning disability," which was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

"One major reason I came to the University of Missouri was the psychology department's strong reputation for studying children's mathematical education," said Chu.

Geary is Curators' Professor and a Thomas Jefferson Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences in MU's College of Arts and Science. vanMarle is the director of MU's Developmental Cognition Lab.

Journal Reference: Felicia W. Chu, Kristy vanMarle, David C. Geary. Quantitative Deficits of Preschool Children at Risk for Mathematical Learning Disability. Frontiers in Psychology, 2013; 4 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00195

Autism: Difficulty in Recognising Faces Linked to Performance in a Group of Neurons

Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) have discovered a brain anomaly that explains why some people diagnosed with autism cannot easily recognise faces -- a deficit linked to the impairments in social interactions considered to be the hallmark of the disorder.

They also say that the novel neuro-imaging analysis technique they developed to arrive at this finding is likely to help link behavioural deficits to differences at the neural level in a range of neurological disorders.

The final manuscript published March 15 in the online journal NeuroImage: Clinical, the scientists say that in the brains of many individuals with autism, neurons in the brain area that processes faces (the fusiform face area, or FFA) are too broadly "tuned" to finely discriminate between facial features of different people.

They made this discovery using a form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that scans output from the blueberry-sized FFA, located behind the right ear.

"When your brain is processing faces, you want neurons to respond selectively so that each is picking up a different aspect of individual faces. The neurons need to be finely tuned to understand what is dissimilar from one face to another," says the study's senior investigator, Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD., an associate professor of neuroscience at GUMC.

"What we found in our 15 adult participants with autism is that in those with more severe behavioral deficits, the neurons are more broadly tuned, so that one face looks more like another, as compared with the fine tuning seen in the FFA of typical adults," he says.

"And we found evidence that reduced selectivity in FFA neurons corresponded to greater behavioral deficits in everyday face recognition in our participants. This makes sense. If your neurons cannot tell different faces apart, it makes it more difficult to tell who is talking to you or understand the facial expressions that are conveyed, which limits social interaction."

Riesenhuber adds that there is huge variation in the ability of individuals diagnosed with autism to discriminate faces, and that some autistic people have no problem with facial recognition.

"But for those that do have this challenge, it can have substantial ramifications -- some researchers believe deficits in face processing are at the root of social dysfunction in autism," he says.

The neural basis for face processing
Neuroscientists have used traditional fMRI studies in the past to probe the neural bases of behavioral differences in people with autism, but these studies have produced conflicting results, says Riesenhuber.

"The fundamental problem with traditional fMRI techniques is that they can tell which parts of the brain become active during face processing, but they are poor at directly measuring neuronal selectivity," he says, "and it is this neuronal selectivity that predicts face processing performance, as shown in our previous studies."

To test their hypothesis that differences in neuronal selectivity in the FFA are foundational to differences in face processing abilities in autism, Riesenhuber and the study's lead author, neuroscientist Xiong Jiang, PhD, developed a novel brain imaging analysis technique, termed local regional heterogeneity, to estimate neuronal selectivity.

Read the full article here 

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Georgetown University Medical Center