IF YOU think you鈥檙e 鈥渘ot a numbers person鈥�, you might be correct. It seems that some people are born with a better sense of numbers than others 鈥� although that doesn鈥檛 mean education can鈥檛 improve your mathematical abilities.
Being good at maths is thought to rely on two factors: the inherent sense of numbers that children possess from a very young age, and formal school education. How these factors are related had not been investigated, until now.
Justin Halberda at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues assessed the ability of 64 American 14-year-olds to guess the number of objects in a group without counting them precisely 鈥� their so-called 鈥淎NS score鈥�. The children had also taken standard maths tests every year between the ages of 5 and 11 years.
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Teenagers with the highest ANS scores also tended to have the best scores in maths tests all the way back to the age of 5, regardless of IQ and visual-spatial reasoning skills (Nature, ). 鈥淭here are vast individual differences in the acuity of this number sense in 14-year-olds,鈥� says Halberda.
While it seems likely that ANS can be partly shaped by education, previous studies have shown that ANS scores in an Amazonian tribe which receives no mathematical education are similar to those in an educated French population, suggesting that the effects of education are likely to be subtle.
Halberda cautions against thinking success or failure in school maths is entirely genetic and immutable. 鈥淎NS is powerful, but it certainly isn鈥檛 predicting 100 per cent of the variance [in maths ability],鈥� he says.
The theory that ANS and exact number skills are linked 鈥渋s a provocative one, since it is unclear why this should be so鈥�, says Brian Butterworth of University College London, whose research found no such link. Recent studies suggest that humans are born with an exact sense of number too. It would be 鈥渦nwise to decide how to teach a child arithmetic on the basis of his or her ability to discriminate approximate numerosities鈥�, he says.
The Human Brain 鈥� With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.
