Collaborative Research: Foundations of Quantitative Thought: Number, Space, Time, and Probability

人类有一种与生俱来的能力来估计数量，但他们的直觉往往包含偏见，干扰学习新的方法来思考数量。卫斯理大学和波士顿学院的研究人员将心理学、神经科学、经济学和教育学结合在一起，揭示了我们估计4种数量的能力背后的认知过程：数字、空间、时间和概率。通过比较这四个不同领域的过程，研究人员的目标是提供一个关于儿童和成人如何估计数量的统一解释，这有可能改变目前对人们如何在STEM学科中和跨STEM学科学习的认知基础的理解。实现一个简单的统一账户是很重要的，因为在所有这些领域中考虑数量的能力是STEM学习的基础。其他教育方面的好处包括与当地博物馆建立合作伙伴关系，使研究团队能够从不同的人群中收集数据，同时也支持博物馆的公共教育工作。该项目还通过在卫斯理大学提供的服务学习课程以及通过两所大学的暑期研究实习交流来培训本科生，从而为STEM劳动力发展做出贡献。该项目的这些方面，加上其强大的理论基础，精心制定的研究问题和人们如何在童年和成年时期对数量进行推理的竞争模型的测试，展示了其指导和改善所有公民STEM学习环境设计的潜力。该项目体现了教育和人力资源核心研究计划对STEM学习基础研究的承诺，技术，以及来自广泛学科和背景的观点。 具体来说，它旨在提供一个统一的儿童和成人如何在四个不同的领域估计数量：数值估计的发展;空间分类（记住项目在空间中的位置）;时间处理的理论神经科学（再现时间持续时间）;和风险下的决策（概率的处理）。通过对成人和儿童的一系列行为研究，研究人员将检验他们的假设，即比例判断是这些领域、发展和背景（不同任务约束）的基本数量估计的基础。这项工作很重要，因为尽管这些文献中描述的行为有惊人的相似之处，但每一个文献对它们的概念都有很大的不同，对产生数量判断的潜在机制提出了不同的解释。该项目将推进并可能改变我们对数量判断中涉及的心理表征和过程的理解，同时还将深入了解数量偏见如何影响教育背景和现实生活中的数字信息处理。通过这种方式，该项目建立了一个连贯的、累积的知识库，重点关注高杠杆率的主题。

Humans have an innate ability to estimate quantities yet their intuitions often contain biases that interfere with learning new ways to think about quantity. Weaving together strands of psychology, neuroscience, economics, and education, researchers at Wesleyan University and Boston College shed light on the cognitive processes underlying our abilities to estimate 4 kinds of quantities: number, space, time, and probability. By comparing processes across these four distinct areas, the researchers aim to provide a unifying account of how children and adults estimate quantities, which has the potential to transform current understanding of the cognitive bases of how people learn in and across STEM disciplines. Achieving a simple unifying account is important because the ability to think well about quantity in all of these areas is fundamental to STEM learning. Other educational benefits include the establishment of partnerships with local museums that allow the research team to collect data from a diverse population while also supporting the museum's public education efforts. This project also contributes to STEM workforce development by training undergraduate students through a service-learning course offered at Wesleyan, and through a summer research internship exchange across the two universities. These aspects of the project, taken with its robust theoretical grounding, well-formulated research questions and tests of competing models of how people reason about quantity in childhood and adulthood, demonstrate its potential to guide and improve the design of STEM learning environments for all citizens.This project exemplifies the Education and Human Resources Core Research program's commitment to fundamental research on learning in STEM that combines theory, techniques, and perspectives from a wide range of disciplines and contexts. Specifically, it aims to provide a unifying account of how children and adults estimate quantities across four distinct domains: the development of numerical estimation; spatial categorization (remembering the location of items in space); the theoretical neuroscience of time processing (reproducing temporal durations); and decision making under risk (the processing of probabilities). Through a series of behavioral studies with adults and children, the researchers will test their hypothesis that proportion judgment underlies basic quantity estimation across these domains, across development, and across contexts (varying task constraints). This work is important because -- despite striking similarities in behaviors described across research in these literatures -- each one conceptualizes them quite differently, positing different accounts of the underlying mechanisms that yield quantity judgments. The project will advance and potentially transform our understanding of mental representations and processes involved in quantity judgments while also providing insight into how quantity biases may influence the processing of numerical information in educational contexts and real-life decisions. In this way the project builds a coherent, cumulative knowledge base, focusing on high-leverage topics.