Gender, Early Spatial Cognition, and the Neural Basis of Mathematics in Children

项目摘要 我们的研究计划确定了支持幼儿数学学习的系统 - 认知发展和认知神经科学领域的基础问题。使用功能 磁成像（fMRI）在4至8岁儿童的纵向研究中，我们将首次评估， 儿童对空间-数字概念的早期神经表征与其随后的 学校的数学能力。我们预测，儿童的早期神经激活预测他们的成长， 计算能力。 我们的建议检查神经发育模式是否在儿童中普遍存在。一些 行为证据表明，男孩和女孩的数学发展在很大程度上是相似的， 有证据表明存在不对称性。目前的建议将评估的相似性和差异， 男孩和女孩的数学发展。这一点之所以重要是因为这一领域的先前研究 是非常有限的，以前的方法和统计技术是有缺陷的，以前的证据是混合的。我们 我们将通过使用严格的新统计方法来解决这一研究领域先前的缺陷，我们将调查 这些问题在神经层面上提供了新的数据模式的相似性和差异。然后我们 研究儿童的神经发育和行为之间的联系，性别社会化， 学习活动。根据先前的研究和我们的初步数据，我们假设男孩和女孩 在认知和神经机制方面基本相似，性别差异只会在后期出现。 年龄在狭窄的任务，这取决于孩子的经验。 我们的研究带来了新的理论区别，创新的方法，和新的神经数据，以一个长期的- 数学发展的长期行为研究传统。假设、实验和 我们提出的分析都是在先前的研究中有充分依据的，但也提供了广泛的新见解。 对心理学、神经科学和教育的意义。

Project Summary Our research program identifies the systems that support mathematics learning during early childhood – a foundational issue in the fields of cognitive development and cognitive neuroscience. By using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) in longitudinal studies of 4- to 8-year-old children, we will assess, for the first time, how children’s early neural representations of spatial-numerical concepts relate to their subsequent mathematical competence in school. We predict that children’s early neural activations predict their growth in calculation abilities. Our proposal examines whether patterns of neural development generalize across children. Some behavioral evidence suggests that mathematics development in boys and girls is largely similar whereas other evidence suggests asymmetries. The current proposal will evaluate similarities and differences in the mathematics development of boys and girls. The reason this is important is because prior research in this area is extremely limited, prior methods and statistical techniques were flawed, and the prior evidence is mixed. We will address prior flaws in this research area by using rigorous new statistical methods, and we will investigate these questions at the neural level which provides new data on patterns of similarity and difference. We then examine the connection between children’s neural development and behavior, gender socialization, and learning activities. Based on previous research and our preliminary data, we hypothesize that boys and girls are largely similar in the cognitive and neural mechanisms, and that gender differences only emerge at later ages in narrow tasks, depending on children’s experiences. Our research brings new theoretical distinctions, innovative methods, and new neural data to a long- standing behavioral research tradition on the development of mathematics. The hypotheses, experiments, and analyses that we propose are all well-founded in prior research but also offer novel insights with broad significance for psychology, neuroscience, and education.