In a nutshell
- Understanding the brain systems at the basis of mathematical understanding can contribute to educators’ understanding of their students’ cognitive, social and emotional abilities and their role in providing opportunities for them to develop these abilities.
- The development of mathematical abilities cannot be restricted or reduced to a single cognitive mechanism or to a single brain region, but the development of these abilities is complex and multidimensional.
- The core functional systems of numerical cognition include the quantity representation system, the visual representation of numbers (Arabic numerals) and the verbal representation of numbers (number words).
Early childhood is a period of heightened brain development during which basic neural networks and connections are formed, which later serve to create increasingly complex nervous systems that facilitate emotions, learning, thinking, reading, mathematical understanding and various behaviours.
It is interesting that young children have innate mathematical abilities, as these are assumed to form the foundation for later symbolic maths skill (Starr et al., 2013). Neural connections strengthen as a result of one’s experiences, practice and interaction with the environment. This process relies on the presence of suitable stimuli and experiences at every stage of development. Understanding the brain systems at the basis of mathematical understanding can contribute to educators’ understanding of their students’ cognitive, social and emotional abilities and their role in providing opportunities for them to develop these abilities.
The development of mathematical abilities cannot be restricted or reduced to a single cognitive mechanism or to a single brain region, but the development of these abilities is complex and multidimensional. Brain networks for perceiving quantities are very important for mathematical thinking and evolve with age and experience. The core functional systems of numerical cognition include the quantity representation system, the visual representation of numbers (Arabic numerals), and the verbal representation of numbers (number words) (triple code model; Dehaene, 1997). The developmental formation of these codes and their corresponding brain systems in the parietal, occipital and temporoparietal cortex have been argued to build an important foundation for the continued development of arithmetic skills and advanced mathematical knowledge (e.g. Vogel & De Smedt, 2021).
Research suggests that several brain regions develop specialized functions for processing symbolic numerical information. This specialization is marked by an increase in brain activation in the parietal cortex, the inferior frontal cortex, and the occipital cortex with age and/or education, and a decrease in brain activation in several regions of the prefrontal cortex. This functional shift in brain activation is related to automatization in processing symbolic numerical information as children gain more experience with this type of stimulus, resulting in reduced working memory load and less attentional effort (e.g. Ansari et al., 2005).
Read more: Maths on the brain
