Children who are good at estimating the number of objects in a group also do well in math, according to scientists.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences published their findings in the journal Nature in October.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of our result," according to principle investigator Jusin Halberda of Johns Hopkins, "is that performance in formal school mathematics is related to a simple, intuitive number sense that we all share. It’s available to infants without training and is used by every human in every culture, as well as by rats, monkeys, and other animals.” Haberda is assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Hopkins.

This Approximate Number System—which is shared broadly across species—is one of two forms of mathematical thinking to which humans have access. Formal mathematics, which is culturally transmitted through learning, is an exclusively human invention. Halberda’s study shows that these two types of mathematical thinking interact, but are not dependent on each other.

The scientist’s  research team didn’t conduct any experiments in formal mathematics—the kind that takes (often frustrating) years of schooling to learn and master. Instead, 64 fourteen-year-olds were asked to estimate the number of flashing blue and yellow dots on a computer screen and estimate which dots were more numerous. While most subjects could easily estimate the number between groups when the discrepancy was large, some struggled when the number was nearer to equal. This helped the researchers determine the accuracy of individual number sense in each subject.

After examining each teenager’s recorded academic performance in math all the way back through kindergarten, the researchers found that those whose number sense was more acute as teenagers had performed at a higher level in mathematics than those with weaker number sense.

Though many of the newspaper accounts of this study suggested number sense may predict math performance, other experts disagree.

“There are a lot of factors that determine how good a child does in math in school,” said John Bates, developmental psychologist at Indiana University in Bloomington. “Of course after 14 years of formal schooling in math, those who performed well throughout would also perform well on a simple numerical task. [This study] isn’t proving that individual differences in mathematics are due to number sense.”

Social psychologist Charles Seger, also at Indiana, had similar doubts about the study.

“Any time I see researchers making a causal attribution to an “evolutionary” process, it seems a bit like hand waving to me,” he said. “If they wanted to really determine any kind of innate number sense, they would have to test subjects who haven’t had 14 years of mathematics behind them. If you’re confident that you’re good at math, you’re not going to be intimidated by a test that involves number estimation. So you can’t assume that an assessment of “inbred” number sense at age 14 says anything about a child’s ability to perform better in school.”

Both Bates and Seger expressed concern for measuring this innate cognitive ability at an age where experience and practice have combined to possibly account for the findings. Bates likened taking number sense data from 14 year olds to testing the endurance of a long-time runner.

“Of course you can say there’s something innate about our ability to count, or at least to estimate and work with numbers. But breathing is evolutionarily innate, and all humans and animals do that too,” said Bates. “If I measure the lung capacity of a runner who loves running and has been doing it all his life, the result is going to be different than if I measure the lung capacity of you or me. If I measure the abilities of a 14 year old who likes math, or is confident in math, or has been practicing in school, then of course I expect that their score will be significantly higher on a number sense task.”

Halberda too says that while the ANS and mathematical capability are related, mathematical performance cannot be attributed to number sense alone.

“It remains to be seen if one can improve a student’s innate number sense by practice and training,” he said. “There are important practical implications that we are exploring in new studies, and we should note that there are many factors that can impact a student’s success or failure in learning mathematics.”

Perhaps the most helpful data to be taken from this study has nothing to do with number sense or performance in math. The more important lesson lies in realizing that popular articles about social and psychological sciences—no matter where they are published or who says they’re right—should always be subject to scrutiny from the reader.

“This is a published study,” said Seger. “It’s not that I think the research was poorly conducted or that the research team has no idea what they’re talking about. I just doubt that the correlation they’re showing is significant, or is causal. The results aren’t really coming to much of a conclusion at all.”

–Lauren Younis

My first session of the morning was Geeks, Freaks, and Deadlines: Writing About Technology and the Humans Who Love it, which gave me a rare opportunity to see Wired’s editor-in-chief, Adam Rogers, live and in person. Being a pretty big Wired fan, it was fascinating to witness the personality behind the magazine. Rogers, who reminds me more of a clean-shaven Robert Downey, Jr. with glasses than the closeted geek he proclaims himself to be (or maybe he’s just skilled at hiding it?), elicited a lot of laughs in his talk on the role of technology in journalism. And his self-effacing charisma is hard not to like. He spoke a bit about his first forays into journalism in the mid-90’s, when he covered the Internet (a subject he was nigh clueless about), joking that "you don’t actually need to know as much as your readers" (knowing more than any of your coworkers suffices, he continues). He aptly characterizes Wired’s subject matter as science fiction stories that happen to be true. But I thought most interesting was his journalistic curiosity—he says he strives to keep Wired from simply publishing product reviews. Rather, he expressed interest in odd technological situations, wondering, for instance, what journalists might have written about the iPod if it hadn’t been such a success. And come to think of it, I’m pretty curious, too.