Chapter 6 - The Control of Selective Attention and Emerging Mathematical Cognition: Beyond Unidirectional Influences

Abstract

Individual differences in the ability to select information important to our current behavioral goals (i.e., the control of selective attention, henceforth “selective attention” for brevity) are related to individual differences in achievement in mathematics. In this chapter, we discuss, first, the overlap of “selective attention” with other commonly used terms, such as “executive functions” and “cognitive control,” in the context of the developmental and mathematical cognition literature. We then consider potential mechanisms underlying these relationships and explore how the control of selective attention and other correlated constructs may play a role in developing mathematical skills. We conclude that assessing the importance of selective attention for learning mathematics requires further longitudinal research and experimental manipulations designed to tease apart the reciprocal interactions between attention and mathematics. Specifically, selective attention not only influences the selection of information to be encoded into memory but also prior knowledge stored in memory influences the control of attention. We propose that this mutual interplay between attention, memory, and learning contributes to emerging mathematical cognition in early childhood and as such should be more carefully considered in numerical cognition research.