Language experience matters for the emergence of early numerical concepts.

Research has shown a link between the acquisition of numerical concepts and language, but exactly how linguistic input matters for numerical development remains unclear. Here, we examine both symbolic (number word knowledge) and non-symbolic (numerical discrimination) numerical abilities in a population in which access to language is limited early in development-oral deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) preschoolers born to hearing parents who do not know a sign language. The oral DHH children demonstrated lower numerical discrimination skills, verbal number knowledge, conceptual understanding of the word "more", and vocabulary relative to their hearing peers.

Children underperform following "math" but not "spatial" task framing.

Increasing evidence suggests that success in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is not only dependent upon one's actual STEM-relevant abilities but also upon one's STEM-relevant attitudes-in particular, math and spatial attitudes. Here, we examine whether simply mentioning the math or spatial relevance of a task affects children's performance and the moderating role of children's math and spatial attitudes. Further, we examine gender differences in performance given pervasive gender gaps in STEM and early-emerging gender differences in math and spatial attitudes.

Who's the winner? Children's math learning in competitive and collaborative scenarios.

Games are frequently used to promote math learning, yet the competitive and collaborative contexts introduced by games may exacerbate gender differences. In this study, 1st and 2nd grade children in the U.S.

Being nice by choice: The effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's social evaluations.

The ability to engage in counterfactual thinking (reason about what else could have happened) is critical to learning, agency, and social evaluation. However, not much is known about how individual differences in counterfactual reasoning may play a role in children's social evaluations. In the current study, we investigate how prompting children to engage in counterfactual thinking about positive moral actions impacts children's social evaluations.

How many seconds was that? Teaching children about time does not refine their ability to track durations.

Over development, children acquire symbols to represent abstract concepts such as time and number. Despite the importance of quantity symbols, it is unknown how acquiring these symbols impacts one's ability to perceive quantities (i.e.

A counting intervention promotes fair sharing in preschoolers.

Recent work has probed the developmental mechanisms that promote fair sharing. This work investigated 2.5- to 5.

Does my daughter like math? Relations between parent and child math attitudes and beliefs.

As early as age six, girls report higher math anxiety than boys, and children of both genders begin to endorse the stereotype that males are better at math than females. However, very few studies have examined the emergence of math attitudes in childhood, or the role parents may play in their transmission. The present study is the first to investigate the concordance of multiple implicit and explicit math attitudes and beliefs between 6- and 10-year-old children and their parents.

Children strategically conceal selfishness.

Can children exploit knowledge asymmetries to get away with selfishness? This question was addressed by testing 6- to 9-year-old children (N = 164; 81 girls) from the Northeastern United States in a modified Ultimatum Game. Children were assigned to the roles of proposers (who offered some proportion of an endowment) and responders (who could accept or reject offers). Both players in the Informed condition knew the endowment quantity in each trial.

Spontaneous and directed attention to number and proportion.

Although difficulties processing both symbolic and nonsymbolic proportion compared with absolute number are well established, the mechanisms involved remain unclear. We investigate four potential explanations to account for better number processing in adulthood: (a) number is more salient than proportion, (b) number is encoded more automatically than proportion, (c) proportion is more effortfully processed than number, and (d) number competes with proportion during decision making. Across three experiments, we used a delayed match-to-sample paradigm in which adults were asked which of two alternatives matched a sample set of red and blue dots.

Children's gesture use provides insight into proportional reasoning strategies.

Children struggle with proportional reasoning when discrete countable information is available because they over-rely on this numerical information even when it leads to errors. In the current study, we investigated whether different types of gesture can exacerbate or mitigate these errors. Children aged 5-7 years (N = 135) were introduced to equivalent proportions using discrete gestures that highlighted separate parts, continuous gestures that highlighted continuous amounts, or no gesture.

Math abilities in deaf and hard of hearing children: The role of language in developing number concepts.

Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children who are not exposed to fluent sign language from birth generally fall behind their hearing peers in mathematics. These disparities are pervasive and emerge as young as 3 years old and continue throughout adulthood. While these limitations have been well-documented, there has been little attempt to empirically explain why one consequence of deafness seems to reflect difficulties with numbers and mathematics.

The impact of set size on cumulative area judgments.

The ability to track number has long been considered more difficult than tracking continuous quantities. Evidence for this claim comes from work revealing that continuous properties (specifically cumulative area) influence numerical judgments, such that adults perform worse on numerical tasks when cumulative area is incongruent with number. If true, then continuous extent tracking abilities should be unimpeded by number.

Preschoolers' number knowledge relates to spontaneous focusing on number for small, but not large, sets.

Much research has examined the reciprocal relations between a child's spontaneous focus on number (SFON) in the preschool years and later mathematical achievement. However, this literature relies on several different tasks to assess SFON with distinct task demands, making it unclear to what extent these tasks measure the same underlying construct. Moreover, prior studies have investigated SFON in the context of small sets exclusively, but no work has explored whether children demonstrate SFON for large sets and how this relates to children's math ability.

Intuitive symbolic magnitude judgments and decision making under risk in adults.

Performance on an intuitive symbolic number skills task-namely the number line estimation task-has previously been found to predict value function curvature in decision making under risk, using a cumulative prospect theory (CPT) model. However there has been no evidence of a similar relationship with the probability weighting function. This is surprising given that both number line estimation and probability weighting can be construed as involving proportion judgment, that is, involving estimating a number on a bounded scale based on its proportional relationship to the whole.

Probability range and probability distortion in a gambling task.

In decision making under risk, adults tend to overestimate small and underestimate large probabilities (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). This inverse S-shaped distortion pattern is similar to that observed in a wide variety of proportion judgment tasks (see Hollands & Dyre, 2000, for review). In proportion judgment tasks, distortion patterns tend not to be fixed but rather to depend on the reference points to which the targets are compared.

Learning about time: Knowledge of formal timing symbols is related to individual differences in temporal precision.

Throughout the life span, we are capable of representing quantities in the absence of language, or nonsymbolically. Additionally, over the course of development, we learn many symbolic measurement systems for representing quantities such as time and number. Despite substantial evidence of a relation between the acquisition of symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical acuity (see Halberda, Mazzocco, & Feigenson, 2008), no work has explored whether a similar relation exists between understanding temporal units of measurement and timing precision.

The effect of multimodal information on children's numerical judgments.

Although much research suggests that adults, infants, and nonhuman primates process number (among other properties) across distinct modalities, limited studies have explored children's abilities to integrate multisensory information when making judgments about number. In the current study, 3- to 6-year-old children performed numerical matching or numerical discrimination tasks in which numerical information was presented either unimodally (visual only), cross-modally (comparing audio with visual), or bimodally (simultaneously presenting audio and visual input). In three experiments, we investigated children's multimodal numerical processing across distinct task demands and difficulty levels.

Partisan mathematical processing of political polling statistics: It's the expectations that count.

In this research, we investigated voters' mathematical processing of election-related information before and after the 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections.

Suboptimality in perceptual decision making and beyond.

We concur with the authors' overall approach and suggest that their analysis should be taken even further. First, the same points apply to areas beyond perceptual decision making. Second, the same points apply beyond issues of optimality versus suboptimality.

Number, time, and space are not singularly represented: Evidence against a common magnitude system beyond early childhood.

Our ability to represent temporal, spatial, and numerical information is critical for understanding the world around us. Given the prominence of quantitative representations in the natural world, numerous cognitive, neurobiological, and developmental models have been proposed as a means of describing how we track quantity. One prominent theory posits that time, space, and number are represented by a common magnitude system, or a common neural locus (i.

Talking about proportion: Fraction labels impact numerical interference in non-symbolic proportional reasoning.

Across two experiments, we investigated how verbal labels impact the way young children attend to proportional information, well before the introduction of formal fraction education. Five- to seven-year-old children were introduced to equivalent non-symbolic proportions labeled in one of three ways: (a) a single, categorical label for multiple fractions (both 3/4 and 6/8 referred to as "blick"), (b) labels that focused on the numerator [e.g.

A divergence of sub- and supra-second timing abilities in childhood and its relation to academic achievement.

Work with adult humans and nonhuman animals provides evidence that the processing of sub-second (<1 s) and supra-second (>1 s) durations are modulated via distinct cognitive and neural systems; however, few studies have explored the development of these separate systems. Moreover, recent research has identified a link between basic timing abilities and academic achievement, yet it is unclear whether sub-second and supra-second temporal processing may play independent roles in this relation. In the current study, we assessed the development of sub- and supra-second timing across middle childhood and examined how each ability may relate to academic achievement.

Cognitive Load Affects Numerical and Temporal Judgments in Distinct Ways.

Prominent theories suggest that time and number are processed by a single neural locus or a common magnitude system (e.g., Meck and Church, 1983; Walsh, 2003).

Even bees know zero is less than one.

Across three elegant experiments, Howard, Avarguès-Weber, Garcia, Greentree, & Dyer (2018) demonstrate that honey bees spontaneously generalize an ordinal rule to empty sets, treating zero as less than other whole numbers. Their findings provide strong evidence that bees have a nonsymbolic concept of zero similar to that found in monkeys and human children, suggesting that this capacity may have important evolutionary significance.

Explaining early moral hypocrisy: Numerical cognition promotes equal sharing behavior in preschool-aged children.

Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an insufficient motivation hypothesis and an insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis. With respect to the latter, we specifically explored whether children's numerical cognition-their understanding of the cardinal principle-might underpin their abilities to share equally.