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Aragón E, Menacho I, Navarro JI, Aguilar M. Teaching strategies, cognitive factors and mathematics. Heliyon 2024; 10:e29831. [PMID: 38742079 PMCID: PMC11089322 DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e29831] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/09/2023] [Revised: 04/10/2024] [Accepted: 04/16/2024] [Indexed: 05/16/2024] Open
Abstract
Mathematics teaching strategies have a positive impact on learning. However, there is a lack of studies on non-traditional approaches to early mathematics education in the specialized scientific literature. In this theoretical framework, a study to connect teaching methodology with the various cognitive processes implicated in learning has been designed. A total of 114 primary school students aged 74 and 84 months who were taught mathematics either with the method called Open Algorithm Based on Numbers or with the more traditional Closed Algorithm Based on Ciphers, participated in the study. After conducting a thorough examination of cognitive processes and early math performance using well-established assessment instruments, a comparative analysis was undertaken to explore the relationship between cognitive predictors of mathematical performance, while considering the mathematics teaching strategies used. Students were distributed according to their level of mathematical competence and teaching methodology and the type of schools (Charter or Public). The results from the multivariate statistical test showed that the teaching strategy was inconclusive for most of the cognitive factors studied. Significant differences according to mathematical performance were found for fluid intelligence, verbal short-term memory, and visuospatial working memory. Finally, no significant differences were found in the cognitive variables studied when considering the interaction between the teaching approach, school characteristics, and mathematical achievement as a reference.
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Affiliation(s)
- Estívaliz Aragón
- Department of Psychology, School of Education, University of Cádiz, Spain
| | - Inmaculada Menacho
- Department of Psychology, School of Education, University of Cádiz, Spain
| | - José I. Navarro
- Department of Psychology, School of Education, University of Cádiz, Spain
| | - Manuel Aguilar
- Department of Psychology, School of Education, University of Cádiz, Spain
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2
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Yu H. The neuroscience basis and educational interventions of mathematical cognitive impairment and anxiety: a systematic literature review. Front Psychol 2023; 14:1282957. [PMID: 38098529 PMCID: PMC10720715 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1282957] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/25/2023] [Accepted: 11/17/2023] [Indexed: 12/17/2023] Open
Abstract
Introduction Mathematics is a fundamental subject with significant implications in education and neuroscience. Understanding the cognitive processes underlying mathematical cognition is crucial for enhancing educational practices. However, mathematical cognitive impairment and anxiety significantly hinder learning and application in this field. This systematic literature review aims to investigate the neuroscience basis and effective educational interventions for these challenges. Methods The review involved a comprehensive screening of 62 research articles that meet the ESSA evidence levels from multiple databases. The selection criteria focused on studies employing various methodologies, including behavioral experiments and neuroimaging techniques, to explore the neuroscience underpinnings and educational interventions related to mathematical cognitive impairment and anxiety. Results The review identified key themes and insights into the neuroscience basis of mathematical cognitive impairment and anxiety. It also examined their impact on educational practices, highlighting the interplay between cognitive processes and educational outcomes. The analysis of these studies revealed significant findings on how these impairments and anxieties manifest and can be addressed in educational settings. Discussion The review critically analyzes the shortcomings of existing research, noting gaps and limitations in current understanding and methodologies. It emphasizes the need for more comprehensive and diverse studies to better understand these phenomena. The discussion also suggests new directions and potential improvement strategies for future research, aiming to contribute to more effective educational interventions and enhanced learning experiences in mathematics. Conclusion This systematic review provides valuable insights into the neuroscience basis of mathematical cognitive impairment and anxiety, offering a foundation for developing more effective educational strategies. It underscores the importance of continued research in this area to improve educational outcomes and support learners facing these challenges.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hao Yu
- Faculty of Education, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
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3
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Al Roumi F, Planton S, Wang L, Dehaene S. Brain-imaging evidence for compression of binary sound sequences in human memory. eLife 2023; 12:e84376. [PMID: 37910588 PMCID: PMC10619979 DOI: 10.7554/elife.84376] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/21/2022] [Accepted: 10/14/2023] [Indexed: 11/03/2023] Open
Abstract
According to the language-of-thought hypothesis, regular sequences are compressed in human memory using recursive loops akin to a mental program that predicts future items. We tested this theory by probing memory for 16-item sequences made of two sounds. We recorded brain activity with functional MRI and magneto-encephalography (MEG) while participants listened to a hierarchy of sequences of variable complexity, whose minimal description required transition probabilities, chunking, or nested structures. Occasional deviant sounds probed the participants' knowledge of the sequence. We predicted that task difficulty and brain activity would be proportional to the complexity derived from the minimal description length in our formal language. Furthermore, activity should increase with complexity for learned sequences, and decrease with complexity for deviants. These predictions were upheld in both fMRI and MEG, indicating that sequence predictions are highly dependent on sequence structure and become weaker and delayed as complexity increases. The proposed language recruited bilateral superior temporal, precentral, anterior intraparietal, and cerebellar cortices. These regions overlapped extensively with a localizer for mathematical calculation, and much less with spoken or written language processing. We propose that these areas collectively encode regular sequences as repetitions with variations and their recursive composition into nested structures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fosca Al Roumi
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Université Paris-Saclay, INSERM, CEA, CNRS, NeuroSpin centerGif/YvetteFrance
| | - Samuel Planton
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Université Paris-Saclay, INSERM, CEA, CNRS, NeuroSpin centerGif/YvetteFrance
| | - Liping Wang
- Institute of Neuroscience, Key Laboratory of Primate Neurobiology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of SciencesShanghaiChina
| | - Stanislas Dehaene
- Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Université Paris-Saclay, INSERM, CEA, CNRS, NeuroSpin centerGif/YvetteFrance
- Collège de France, Université Paris Sciences Lettres (PSL)ParisFrance
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Van Rinsveld A, Wens V, Guillaume M, Beuel A, Gevers W, De Tiège X, Content A. Automatic Processing of Numerosity in Human Neocortex Evidenced by Occipital and Parietal Neuromagnetic Responses. Cereb Cortex Commun 2021; 2:tgab028. [PMID: 34296173 PMCID: PMC8152830 DOI: 10.1093/texcom/tgab028] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/20/2021] [Revised: 03/20/2021] [Accepted: 04/05/2021] [Indexed: 01/23/2023] Open
Abstract
Humans and other animal species are endowed with the ability to sense, represent, and mentally manipulate the number of items in a set without needing to count them. One central hypothesis is that this ability relies on an automated functional system dedicated to numerosity, the perception of the discrete numerical magnitude of a set of items. This system has classically been associated with intraparietal regions, however accumulating evidence in favor of an early visual number sense calls into question the functional role of parietal regions in numerosity processing. Targeting specifically numerosity among other visual features in the earliest stages of processing requires high temporal and spatial resolution. We used frequency-tagged magnetoencephalography to investigate the early automatic processing of numerical magnitudes and measured the steady-state brain responses specifically evoked by numerical and other visual changes in the visual scene. The neuromagnetic responses showed implicit discrimination of numerosity, total occupied area, and convex hull. The source reconstruction corresponding to the implicit discrimination responses showed common and separate sources along the ventral and dorsal visual pathways. Occipital sources attested the perceptual salience of numerosity similarly to both other implicitly discriminable visual features. Crucially, we found parietal responses uniquely associated with numerosity discrimination, showing automatic processing of numerosity in the parietal cortex, even when not relevant to the task. Taken together, these results provide further insights into the functional roles of parietal and occipital regions in numerosity encoding along the visual hierarchy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Amandine Van Rinsveld
- Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), UNI – ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels 1050, Belgium
| | - Vincent Wens
- Laboratoire de Cartographie fonctionnelle du Cerveau (LCFC), UNI – ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels 1070, Belgium
- Magnetoencephalography Unit, Department of Functional Neuroimaging, Service of Nuclear Medicine, CUB – Hôpital Erasme, Brussels 1070, Belgium
| | - Mathieu Guillaume
- Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), UNI – ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels 1050, Belgium
| | - Anthony Beuel
- Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), UNI – ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels 1050, Belgium
| | - Wim Gevers
- Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), UNI – ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels 1050, Belgium
| | - Xavier De Tiège
- Laboratoire de Cartographie fonctionnelle du Cerveau (LCFC), UNI – ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels 1070, Belgium
- Magnetoencephalography Unit, Department of Functional Neuroimaging, Service of Nuclear Medicine, CUB – Hôpital Erasme, Brussels 1070, Belgium
| | - Alain Content
- Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), UNI – ULB Neuroscience Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels 1050, Belgium
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Haman M, Lipowska K. Moving attention along the mental number line in preschool age: Study of the operational momentum in 3- to 5-year-old children's non-symbolic arithmetic. Dev Sci 2020; 24:e13007. [PMID: 32567767 DOI: 10.1111/desc.13007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/16/2018] [Revised: 05/03/2020] [Accepted: 06/02/2020] [Indexed: 01/29/2023]
Abstract
People tend to underestimate subtraction and overestimate addition outcomes and to associate subtraction with the left side and addition with the right side. These two phenomena are collectively labeled 'operational momentum' (OM) and thought to have their origins in the same mechanism of 'moving attention along the mental number line'. OM in arithmetic has never been tested in children at the preschool age, which is critical for numerical development. In this study, 3-5 years old were tested with non-symbolic addition and subtraction tasks. Their level of understanding of counting principles (CP) was assessed using the give-a-number task. When the second operand's cardinality was 5 or 6 (Experiment 1), the child's reaction time was shorter in addition/subtraction tasks after cuing attention appropriately to the right/left. Adding/subtracting one element (Experiment 2) revealed a more complex developmental pattern. Before acquiring CP, the children showed generalized overestimation bias. Underestimation in addition and overestimation in subtraction emerged only after mastering CP. No clear spatial-directional OM pattern was found, however, the response time to rightward/leftward cues in addition/subtraction again depended on stage of mastering CP. Although the results support the hypothesis about engagement of spatial attention in early numerical processing, they point to at least partial independence of the spatial-directional and magnitude OM. This undermines the canonical version of the number line-based hypothesis. Mapping numerical magnitudes to space may be a complex process that undergoes reorganization during the period of acquisition of symbolic representations of numbers. Some hypotheses concerning the role of spatial-numerical associations in numerical development are proposed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maciej Haman
- Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warszawa, Poland
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Requena-Komuro MC, Marshall CR, Bond RL, Russell LL, Greaves C, Moore KM, Agustus JL, Benhamou E, Sivasathiaseelan H, Hardy CJD, Rohrer JD, Warren JD. Altered Time Awareness in Dementia. Front Neurol 2020; 11:291. [PMID: 32373055 PMCID: PMC7186333 DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2020.00291] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/12/2019] [Accepted: 03/26/2020] [Indexed: 01/28/2023] Open
Abstract
Our awareness of time, specifically of longer intervals spanning hours, days, months, and years, is critical for ensuring our sense of self-continuity. Disrupted time awareness over such intervals is a clinical feature in a number of frontotemporal dementia syndromes and Alzheimer's disease, but has not been studied and compared systematically in these diseases. We used a semi-structured caregiver survey to capture time-related behavioral alterations in 71 patients representing all major sporadic and genetic syndromes of frontotemporal dementia, in comparison to 28 patients with typical Alzheimer's disease and nine with logopenic aphasia, and 32 healthy older individuals. Survey items pertained to apparent difficulties ordering past personal events or estimating time intervals between events, temporal rigidity and clockwatching, and propensity to relive past events. We used a logistic regression model including diagnosis, age, gender, and disease severity as regressors to compare the proportions of individuals exhibiting each temporal awareness symptom between diagnostic groups. Gray matter associations of altered time awareness were assessed using voxel-based morphometry. All patient groups were significantly more prone to exhibit temporal awareness symptoms than healthy older individuals. Clinical syndromic signatures were identified. While patients with typical and logopenic Alzheimer's disease most frequently exhibited disturbed event ordering or interval estimation, patients with semantic dementia were most prone to temporal rigidity and clockwatching and those with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia commonly exhibited all these temporal symptoms as well as a propensity to relive past events. On voxel-based morphometry, the tendency to relive past events was associated with relative preservation of a distributed left-sided temporo-parietal gray matter network including hippocampus. These findings reveal a rich and complex picture of disturbed temporal awareness in major dementia syndromes, with stratification of frontotemporal dementia syndromes from Alzheimer's disease. This is the first study to assess symptoms of altered temporal awareness across frontotemporal dementia syndromes and provides a motivation for future work directed to the development of validated clinical questionnaires, analysis of underlying neurobiological mechanisms and design of interventions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maï-Carmen Requena-Komuro
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Charles R Marshall
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.,Preventive Neurology Unit, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Rebecca L Bond
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Lucy L Russell
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Caroline Greaves
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Katrina M Moore
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Jennifer L Agustus
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Elia Benhamou
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Harri Sivasathiaseelan
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Chris J D Hardy
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Jonathan D Rohrer
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Jason D Warren
- Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
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Toomarian EY, Hubbard EM. On the genesis of spatial-numerical associations: Evolutionary and cultural factors co-construct the mental number line. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 2018; 90:184-199. [PMID: 29684402 PMCID: PMC5993626 DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.04.010] [Citation(s) in RCA: 45] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/21/2017] [Revised: 04/11/2018] [Accepted: 04/12/2018] [Indexed: 01/29/2023]
Abstract
Mapping numbers onto space is a common cognitive representation that has been explored in both behavioral and neuroimaging contexts. Empirical work probing the diverse nature of these spatial-numerical associations (SNAs) has led researchers to question 1) how the human brain links numbers with space, and 2) whether this link is biologically vs. culturally determined. We review the existing literature on the development of SNAs and situate that empirical work within cognitive and neuroscientific theoretical frameworks. We propose that an evolutionarily-ancient frontal-parietal circuit broadly tuned to multiple magnitude dimensions provides the phylogenetic substrate for SNAs, while enculturation and sensorimotor experience shape their specific profiles. We then use this perspective to discuss educational implications and highlight promising avenues for future research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Elizabeth Y Toomarian
- Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1025 W. Johnson St. Madison, WI, 53706, United States of America.
| | - Edward M Hubbard
- Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1025 W. Johnson St. Madison, WI, 53706, United States of America
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