Neural Correlate Differences in Number Sense Between Children With Low and Middle/High Socioeconomic Status.

Qing Bao,Gui Li Shi,Yuan Liang,Li Jin Zhang,Yan Bang Zhou

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.534367

Abstract

Although some cognitive studies provided reasons that children with low socioeconomic status (SES) showed poor mathematical achievements, there was no explicit evidence to directly explain the root of lagged performance in children with low SES. Therefore, the present study explored the differences in neural correlates in the process of symbolic magnitude comparison between children with different SESs by the event-related potentials (ERPs). A total of 16 second-graders from low-SES families and 16 from middle/high-SES families participated in this study. According to the results of anterior N1 (early attention) and P2 (extraction of numerical meaning) over the frontal region, the differences among children with different SESs were manifested as differences in general neural activities in terms of attention and top-down cognitive control. In the late stage of cognitive processing, there was no significant difference in the average amplitude of the late positive component (LPC) between children with different SES, indicating that low SES did not influence the information encoding and memory updating of numerical representation, which was responsible by the parietal lobe. The educational implications of this study are mentioned in the discussion.

Highlights

Cognitive psychologists and math educators have different definitions of number sense (Gersten et al, 2005), most of them agree that it is an ability to subitize small quantities, discern number patterns, compare numerical magnitudes, estimate quantities, count, and perform simple number transformations (Berch, 2005)
Grand average event-related potentials (ERPs) over the 32 participants elicited by the magnitude comparison task showed a sequence of events
The present study confirmed the conclusion that children with low socioeconomic status (SES) showed more negative amplitude between 100 and 140 ms after the digits occurred, indicating that when these children perceived and recognized the numbers, they needed to invest more attention resources to suppress the interference of irrelevant information to their intentional attention to catch up with children with middle/high SES

Summary

Introduction

Cognitive psychologists and math educators have different definitions of number sense (Gersten et al, 2005), most of them agree that it is an ability to subitize small quantities, discern number patterns, compare numerical magnitudes, estimate quantities, count, and perform simple number transformations (Berch, 2005). Rubinsten et al (2002) study on children from the beginning of school to the fifth grade found that the size congruity effect did not appear until the end of the first grade (average age, 7.3 years); that is, the consistency of the physical size of two numbers to be compared with their numerical value will affect children’s reaction time (RT) and accuracy (ACC). This result indicated that children began to process symbolic numbers automatically at the end of the first grade. These results revealed that the representation of multiple digits by second-graders has gradually matured

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion