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17 - Numerical Cognition and Executive Functions

Development As Progressive Inhibitory Control of Misleading Visuospatial Dimensions

from Subpart II.2 - Childhood and Adolescence: The Development of Human Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

By
Margot Roell ,
Olivier Houdé ,
Grégoire Borst  and
Arnaud Viarouge
Edited by
Olivier Houdé  and
Grégoire Borst
Olivier Houdé
Affiliation:
Université de Paris V
Grégoire Borst
Affiliation:
Université de Paris V
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Summary

Theories have ventured to explain how the human brain has gained the unique ability to develop mathematical concepts and theories. One theory states that mathematics has appeared as a by-product of the human language faculty (Chomsky, 2006). Alternatively, recent cognitive neuroscience research have postulated that mathematics arose from non-linguistic intuitions of numbers and space (Dehaene, 2011; Dillon et al., 2013). Indeed, studies have observed that infants (Starkey & Cooper, 1980; Starkey et al., 1983) and Amazonian indigenous adults with no education in Mathematics and who do not possess number words (Dehaene et al. 2008, Pica et al., 2004) display abstract proto-mathematical intuitions of arithmetic and geometry. These ‘core knowledges’ (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007) have been theorized to be the ontological building blocks that scaffold our ability for representing numbers symbolically and performing exact arithmetic (Starr et al., 2013). They have been found to be predictive of later, more complex mathematical abilities (Gilmore et al., 2010; Halberda et al., 2008; Starr et al., 2013), supporting the idea that complex mathematics would arise from core representations of number and space (Amalric & Dehaene, 2016). Extensive research has shown that numerical and spatial cognition were tightly connected (Hubbard et al., 2005). In some contexts, this relation between number and visuospatial dimensions, such as spatial extent or density, can lead to interferences which can hinder the development of math abilities.

Type
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Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Development , pp. 383 - 407
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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