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

项目摘要 我们的研究项目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性问题。通过使用功能 在4至8岁儿童的纵向研究中，我们将首次评估， 儿童早期对空间-数字概念的神经表征如何与随后的 在学校里的数学能力。我们预测，儿童早期的神经激活预测他们在未来的成长 计算能力。 我们的提案调查了神经发育模式是否在儿童中普遍存在。一些人 行为证据表明，男孩和女孩的数学发展大致相似，而其他 证据表明，这是不对称的。目前的提案将评估两国在 男生和女生的数学发展。这一点之所以重要，是因为这一领域的先前研究 是极其有限的，以前的方法和统计技术都是有缺陷的，以前的证据是喜忧参半的。我们 将通过使用严格的新统计方法来解决这一研究领域以前的缺陷，我们将调查 这些问题在神经层面上提供了关于相似和不同模式的新数据。然后我们 研究儿童神经发育与行为、性别社会化和 学习活动。根据之前的研究和我们的初步数据，我们假设男孩和女孩 在认知和神经机制上很大程度上相似，性别差异只是在后来才出现 年龄在狭隘的任务中，这取决于孩子的经历。 我们的研究带来了新的理论差异、创新的方法和新的神经数据- 在数学发展上坚持行为研究的传统。假设、实验和 我们提出的分析都是基于先前的研究，但也提供了新的见解和广泛的 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.