Poster #39 - Relations between Spontaneous Focusing on Number, Non-symbolic Number Processing, and Math Abilities

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Spontaneous focus on number (SFON) is a measure of children’s attention towards numerosity in everyday situations (Hannula & Lehtinen, 2005). Previous research has found that SFON is a significant predictor of math skills in elementary school aged children (Hannula, Lepola & Lehtinen, 2010). Some work suggests that children’s intuitive or non-symbolic number skills may partially explain these associations (Batchelor, Inglis, & Gilmore, 2015). However, many different tasks have been used to quantify children’s SFON, and little is known about how these tasks relate to each other, and to non-symbolic number skills as well as math abilities. In this study, we compare several tasks commonly used to measure SFON in early childhood and assess how each relates to children’s non-symbolic number skills and formal math skills.
Seventy-eight children (37 boys) aged 3 years 11 months to 4 years 2 months participated in two lab visits roughly two months apart. At the first lab visit, children completed a SFON stamping task, where an experimenter put stamps onto a dinosaur picture and the child was asked to make their picture look the same, and a SFON puppet task, where an experimenter fed a puppet marbles and the child was asked to replicate the behavior. At the second visit, children completed another SFON stamping task and a SFON mailbox task, where an experimenter mailed letters in a toy mailbox and the child was asked to do the same (all tasks drawn from Hannula & Lehtinen, 2005). Each task contained three trials, and for each trial, children were coded as focusing on number if they replicated the quantity (e.g., put the same number of stamps on the dinosaur) or verbally mentioned number or quantities (e.g. “You have five stamps” or “I gave him more food than you”). Children also completed a non-symbolic number comparison task (Halberda et al., 2008) and a standardized math assessment (the Test of Early Mathematics Ability (TEMA-3); Ginsburg & Baroody, 2003) at each time point. Average percent correct across the two time points was used to quantity performance on the non-symbolic number comparison task and average raw TEMA-3 scores were used as a measure of math skills.
As shown in Table 1, the distributions of the four SFON measures were comparable. However, the two stamping tasks and the mailbox task were significantly correlated with one another, whereas performance on the puppet task was not associated with SFON scores on any of the other three SFON tasks. Only performance on the stamping tasks was related to children’s accuracy on the non-symbolic number comparison task, possibly due to the small set sizes or memory demands of the other SFON tasks. SFON scores from the stamping and puppet tasks were correlated with math skills. Importantly, the correlations between the stamping tasks and math persisted even when controlling for non-symbolic number skills. Similarly, correlations between SFON and non-symbolic number skills persisted when controlling for math skills. These findings suggest that SFON is uniquely associated with both non-symbolic number skills and math abilities.

Authors

• Adwoa Imbeah, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Leanne Elliott, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melissa Libertus, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author