The Effects Of Approximate Number System Acuity On Preschool Children’s Symbolic Number Abilities

Evidence from cognitive development, comparative cognition, cross-culture cognition andneurobiology has proved the existence of a system which approximately represents the numberof objects or events in a nonverbal way. This representation system, which is called approximatenumber system (ANS) by Halberda and Feigenson, is noisy and exists across species. ANSacuity is always indexed by Weber fraction and accuracy acquired by the non-symbolicmagnitude comparison task. Recent years, more and more researchers have proved thesignificant positive correlation between acuity of ANS and math performance. There are someresearchers using an modified detection paradigms which commonly used in the infant andneuroscience studies to measure the acuity of ANS of adults, they believe it is a more purelymethod to measure numerosity representation and this would ensure better compatibility with thedetection type tasks used with infants. But the paradigm has not been used in preschool children,and the relationship between the acuity of ANS measured by this paradigm and math ability isnot clear. The studies about the relationship is largely based on correlation or regression analysis,which could not know the casual direction.This study includes two studies. The first one is to examine the relationship between ANSacuity and symbolic number abilities in preschool children with two ANS acuity tasks.1223to6-year-old children participated in our study to complete11measures to access ANS acuity,symbolic number abilities, inhibitory control, short memory, working memory and receptivevocabulary. The second one is to training the ANS of5and6-year-old children by non-symbolicnumerical addition task.The results indicated:(1)Subjects performed significantly above chance level in all ANSacuity tasks，but the performance of non-symbolic magnitude comparison task was better thansame-different task. The main effect of age and ratio were significant in these two tasks. Theseresults indicated these tasks are applicable to measure ANS acuity of3to6-year-old preschoolchildren.(2)With the age increasing, ANS acuity of preschool children continues to increase.(3)After controlling for short memory, working memory, inhibitory control and receptive vocabulary, the weber faction calculated by non-symbolic magnitude comparison task correlatedwith cardinality proficiency and symbolic number knowledge, while the accuracy of this taskcorrelated with counting skills, cardinality proficiency and symbolic number knowledge. Thetotal accuracy of same different task did not correlated with symbolic number abilities, while theaccuracy of different trails correlated with symbolic number knowledge.(4)ANS training couldenhance the speed of symbolic addition and subtraction of5to6-year-old preschool children, butcould not enhance the performance of counting skills, symbolic number knowledge and simplecalculation skills.