Humans have an inborn, intuitive clench of numbers racket that varies sharply from one
person to the next and is tight linked to advanced math skills, according to a
study released on Sunday.
Scientists ascertained that
children whose "close together number system" (ANS) was highly developed were too
good in school-taught math from an early
age.
"It is difficult to
overstate the importance of the �number sense' for all kinds of animals,"
said lead researcher Justin Halberda, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore.
Halberda and two
colleagues tested this hard-wired ability to judge quantities by showing 64
14-year-olds a series of images containing between 10 and 32 dots that were
either blue or yellow. In some images "flashed for only fifth part of a second
"in that location were double as many dots of one colour. In other images, however, the ratio
was closer to parity with, for example, seven yellow dots and eight-spot blue, and
thus a good deal harder to
discern.
The results showed a
wide variation in the capacity to pick the colour with the most dots at least 75%
of the time, suggesting that some citizenry are but much better at such
lightning-fast "guesstimates."
Even more than unexpected was the
extent to which the deuce distinct kinds of number crunching cognition. Kids that
performed best in the image test were also those who scored the highest in mathematics
achievement tests, going back almost 10 years to kindergarten.
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