Six-month-old babies can start honing maths skills
DELHI aptitude for maths starts developing in babies as young as six months of age, US researchers have found. Tracking the maths sense in babies, they found that by three and a half years age, babies that started earlier became more skilled than others.
The research was done by Elizabeth Brannon, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and her colleagues and is published in the scientific journal Proceedings ofthe National Academy of Sciences this week.
Brannon had earlier shown that six-month-old babies did have a number sense in varying degrees. In a 2010 experiment they showed two screens to a group of babies. One showed a constant number of dots that changed in appearance while the other showed a changing number of dots that also changed in appearance. Brannon found that some babies which presumably had a better number sense spent more time gazing at the screen with changing number of dots.
In her latest experiment, Brannon took this process one step ahead. Her team took a group of 48 babies that had earlier been tested when they were six-month-old, and again tested them three years later for maths ability. Tests suitable for their age were used - ability to count, identifying the larger number in a pair and some basic calculations.
To their surprise they found that the babies who had gazed at the changing number of dots screen more when they were six-month-old scored consistently higher in the tests at three-and-a-half-years age. Tests showed that the correlation was not connected to the babies' IQ or non-numerical abilities.
Does this mean that babies are born with maths abilities? No, says Brannon. It is possible that in the first six months of the baby's life some influences acted to make it inclined towards math.
"(T)here's plenty of opportunity for environmental influence" on mathematical abilities, she was quoted by Nature as saying.
Another caution was added by Justin Halberda, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. Nature quoted him saying that "A baby's performance on this test will also not determine their later scores on standardized tests". Other factors like short-term memory go towards building mathematical skills and these can be developed by training.
DELHI aptitude for maths starts developing in babies as young as six months of age, US researchers have found. Tracking the maths sense in babies, they found that by three and a half years age, babies that started earlier became more skilled than others.
The research was done by Elizabeth Brannon, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and her colleagues and is published in the scientific journal Proceedings ofthe National Academy of Sciences this week.
Brannon had earlier shown that six-month-old babies did have a number sense in varying degrees. In a 2010 experiment they showed two screens to a group of babies. One showed a constant number of dots that changed in appearance while the other showed a changing number of dots that also changed in appearance. Brannon found that some babies which presumably had a better number sense spent more time gazing at the screen with changing number of dots.
In her latest experiment, Brannon took this process one step ahead. Her team took a group of 48 babies that had earlier been tested when they were six-month-old, and again tested them three years later for maths ability. Tests suitable for their age were used - ability to count, identifying the larger number in a pair and some basic calculations.
To their surprise they found that the babies who had gazed at the changing number of dots screen more when they were six-month-old scored consistently higher in the tests at three-and-a-half-years age. Tests showed that the correlation was not connected to the babies' IQ or non-numerical abilities.
Does this mean that babies are born with maths abilities? No, says Brannon. It is possible that in the first six months of the baby's life some influences acted to make it inclined towards math.
"(T)here's plenty of opportunity for environmental influence" on mathematical abilities, she was quoted by Nature as saying.
Another caution was added by Justin Halberda, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. Nature quoted him saying that "A baby's performance on this test will also not determine their later scores on standardized tests". Other factors like short-term memory go towards building mathematical skills and these can be developed by training.
No comments:
Post a Comment