Abstract
This paper explores whether mathematical education has effects on brain development from the perspective of brain MRIs. While biochemical changes in the left middle front gyrus region of the brain have been investigated, we proposed to classify students by using MRIs from the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) region that was left untouched in the previous study. On the cropped IPS regions, the proposed model developed popular contrastive learning (CL) to solve the problem of multi-instance representation learning. The resulted data representations were then fed into a linear neural network to identify whether students were in the math group or the non-math group. Experiments were conducted on 123 adolescent students, including 72 math students and 51 non-math students. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 90.24 % for student classification, gaining more than 5% improvements compared to the classical CL frame. Our study provides not only a multi-instance extension to CL and but also an MRI insight into the impact of mathematical studying on brain development.
Highlights
Mathematical learning has significant impacts on the brain’s plasticity and cognitive functions and has been associated with many quality-of-life and development indices (Beddington et al, 2008; Zacharopoulos et al, 2021)
While the GABA in the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) was investigated (Zacharopoulos et al, 2021), we in this paper looked into the math-learning impact on brain development from the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) region that is frequently reported in neuroimaging studies of arithmetic
We made an attempt to classify students that have stopped studying mathematics and students that have continued their mathematical education by using the popular deep learning technique
Summary
Mathematical learning has significant impacts on the brain’s plasticity and cognitive functions and has been associated with many quality-of-life and development indices (Beddington et al, 2008; Zacharopoulos et al, 2021). While psychology explores learning behaviors from phenotypes, biological analysis is used extract the intrinsic impact of education on individuals from brain structure or genotypes (Liu et al, 2021; Peng et al, 2021c; Zacharopoulos et al, 2021). By examining the neurotransmitter concentrations in the brain, they found that the γ -aminobutyric acid (GABA) concentration in the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) is closely associated with mathematical learning and mathematical reasoning This is evidence that the lack of math education has effects on brain plasticity and cognitive functions. While the GABA in the MFG was investigated (Zacharopoulos et al, 2021), we in this paper looked into the math-learning impact on brain development from the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) region that is frequently reported in neuroimaging studies of arithmetic. Our contributions could be summarized in two aspects: (1) We developed the classical CL model into the setting of multi-instance learning to solve our problem formulation. (2) This study aimed to explore the impact of mathematical education from structural brain MRIs
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