Science: What babies know about numbers? Part II

A strong case for “baby number sense”

Were the babies really responding to the change in numerosity? It certainly seems so.

Babies reacted similarly when presented with pairs of small numbers (2 vs 3) and distant, large numbers (4 vs 12).

And researchers controlled for several, non-numerical variables that could have influenced babies—like the total surface area of the objects, the average area devoted to each object, the total luminance of each image, and the total area occupied by each group of objects.

So babies weren’t simply attending to the continuous extent of “stuff” in each image.

In fact, other experiments suggest that babies pay more attention to change in number than they do to changes in continuous extent or surface area (Cordes and Brannon 2008).

Nor is it all “in the eye.” If babies’ feats of numerical discrimination were confined to visible objects, we might suspect that the ability is domain specific—a specialization of the visual system rather than a more general conceptual ability. But babies aren’t one-trick ponies. In addition to distinguishing visual arrays, babies can also detect differences in the number of sounds and in the number of actions (Lipton and Spelke 2003; Wood and Spelke 2005).

Babies can even understand ordinality—the idea that numbers can be arranged in order of magnitude. When 11-month old babies were presented with sequences of numerosities, they could discriminate between sequences that increased and sequences that decreased (Brannon 2002).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that babies can distinguish any two numbers. There are limits. For instance:

• Six-month old babies have a hard time distinguishing two quantities if the ratio between them is less than 2:1. In other words, they can handle 8 vs. 16, but fail to distinguish 8 vs. 12 (Xu and Arriaga 2007; Lipton and Spelke 2003)
  
  
• Nine- and 10-month olds can make finer distinctions (8 vs. 12). But even these older babies don’t seem to discriminate between 8 and 10 (Xu and Arriaga 2004; Lipton and Spelke 2003)
  
  
• Babies don’t distinguish between increasing and decreasing sequences of numbers until the approach the end of their first year. When Elizabeth Brannon tested 9-month old babies, they failed the test (Brannon 2002)

Nevertheless, the results are pretty impressive. When babies look at a set of objects, they don’t just see a “bunch.” Babies have an approximate sense of number.

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Science: What babies know about numbers?

Image via Wikipedia

New experimental research reveals a fascinating new world of baby cognition, one in which babies can

• recognize the approximate difference between two numbers
• keep precise track of small numbers, and
• do simple subtraction and addition problems.

Moreover, when babies perform these feats they activate the same parts of the brain that are associated with mathematical thinking in adults.

What babies know about numerosity

Psychologists define “numerosity” as the number of things in a set.

Although we can get a precise measure of numerosity by counting, it’s possible to appreciate numerosity in a more approximate way.

For instance, if I ask you to glance in a crowded elevator and estimate how many people are there, you can probably make a pretty good guess.

Glance inside two elevators, and you’ll also be pretty good at guessing which one has more people in it.

All without counting.

It turns out that adult humans aren’t the only creatures who can pull this off. A variety of non-verbal creatures—including monkeys, rats, and human infants—can detect the approximate difference in magnitude between two sets (Dehaene 1999).

Show them two displays—one featuring 8 items and the other only 4 items—and they will respond differently depending on what they see.

And the difference is observable in the brain.

When 3-month old infants were shown a series of displays depicting different quantities of objects, the electrical activity of their brains changed in response (Izard et al 2008).

For example, babies were presented with a continuous stream of images, each depicting 4 objects. From image to image, the objects were arranged differently. But the total number of objects remained the same.

Infants subjected to this program showed signs of boredom.

But their brain activity (as measured by event-related potentials, or ERPs) would perk up if they were next presented with an image showing 8 objects.

What’s more, the part of the brain that was activated was the same region that lights up when adults process information about numbers (Izard et al 2008).

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How to teach babies reading and mathematics (part 3)

One of the most prominent teachers of the Flashcard system for babies is Glenn Doman. He invented the system in the 1950s and teaches it the parents in a weekly course in his Institute.

He also wrote books about how to teach your baby reading and how you baby can learn mathematics and calculation. He sells also his own Flashcards for different areas of life called encyclopedic knowledge.

We made yesterday the first video of Tim and how we teach him to learn the "numbers" with the black and white math dot flashcards. We will upload the video during the day into this post.

There you will see that it calms him down because at the moment when we took the video he just started crying.

How to teach babies reading and math (Part 2)

We show our baby boy Tim now already since four weeks the DIY (Do It Yourself) Black and White Dot-Flashcards which show the numbers as dots. In this time he enjoyed watching the Flashcards each day more and more.

Since the weekend we recognized that we can calm down him when he is crying. We just have to show him one of the Black and White Dot Flashcards and he will start looking at them. Usually it is followed by a smile from him. That's one of the signs that he i willing to learn.

We try to make a short video the next time about the way we teach him to recognize the shapes. And you will see how he will learn the first steps to learn math.

I guess this will be in the next hours, so that we can publish the video or some pictures tomorrow.

How to teach your baby reading and math (part 1)

Do you know that you can teach newborn baby everything from birth on?

Do you know that some babies can read and make maths calculations already with 12 months? No?
We will show you how these kids have learned these skills within their first year of life!

Do you know that your baby can only see high-contrast colours?

According to the studies, the visual system is the least mature system at birth, therefore the newborn baby is not able to perceive the bright colours. Hence, black and white colours can easily attract baby and this will enhance the growth of the vision system.

Studies show that high contrast graphics can

• help increase concentration skills
  
• stimulate the creation of synapses (brain cell connections)
• increase an infant's attention span
• calm a baby (when she is bored)
• enhance curiosity
  

It is believed that showing black and white flashcards and toys to the newborn baby from birth on, the baby can response to mother's smiles faster as it stimulates the vision system. Black and white colours are effective to baby from birth to six months.


Few days before, we bought Timmy a set of black and white flash cards which contains 60 cards and double sided with 120 images. Its size is 31.4cm X 23.3cm, baby prefers to see big images or letters. So far, Timmy shows his interests on the flash cards. We showed him just now during the nappies time, he even smiled at the images! :-) We think this is also a bonding time together with Timmy, we enjoy these precious moments!



Why did we choose black and white flashcards?

When Timmy was about 7-week-old, we DIY (Do It Yourself) the black math dots cards from number 1 to 7. We showed Timmy faithfully every day, we found that Timmy was able to focus on the flash cards. One week later, he started to smile at us and respond to us every day until now. Before this, we only could get the smile from Timmy while he was falling asleep. But now we can "chit-chat" with Timmy every day and of course he shows us his angel smiles most of time! :-)


There are many websites available for parents to print out the flash cards, you can DIY! If you are interested, you might want to check out this website Brillkids, you can even join their forum to share your views and experiences.