The Role of Attentional Control in Early Mathematical Learning

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The project, led by a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, aims to understand the relationship between attention and early mathematical development. Children’s first mathematical skills, like counting and number estimation, are typically measured using tasks that require children to sustain attention. In some cases their knowledge of mathematics is intrinsically linked to attentional processes. For example, in counting, children must learn to attend selectively to each object in a set and do so in sequence. They must then say a different word for each object that is selected. Despite the importance of attention in these early mathematical skills, the precise role that it plays in supporting or constraining early mathematical development is not understood. The research described in this proposal will involve tasks that measure attention in conjunction with mathematical skills for individual children between 2 and 8 years of age in order to clarify the role that attention plays in early mathematics. It will help point to whether difficulties in some mathematical skills may be traceable to differences in underlying attentional systems. The researchers will recruit both high and low SES (socioeconomic status) children in order to understand whether SES differences in mathematical cognition may be traceable to these systems, thereby providing a necessary first-step in developing cognitively-based interventions which may improve achievement in these groups. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning. Two of the most widely studied numerical skills, counting and approximate number estimation, depend on appropriately deploying attentional resources in order to arrive at a mental representation of quantity. However, many cognitive theories and experimental studies treat measurements of these abilities as reflecting purely numerical processes rather than being dependent on general cognitive resources like attention. This project aims to quantify and formally model the role that attention plays in counting and estimation, and to clarify the degree to which it accounts for individual differences in performance on mathematical tasks, thereby allowing further investigation of whether attentional limitations may constrain mathematical development across age and SES. This will have the potential to show, for example, how much of children’s protracted timeline in learning counting may be due to waiting for the underlying attentional system to develop. If successful, this work will further help suggest what kinds of interventions on non-numerical cognitive skills may have important implications for improving mathematical education or potentially STEM education more broadly. The researchers will also create an open dataset of eye-tracking trajectories as children engage in numerical tasks, create tools for analyzing eye-tracking data, and formalize accounts of how visual information processing may give rise to patterns observed in numerical cognition, like subitizing, Weber’s law, and numerical estimation biases.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.