Loughborough University, Leicestershire, England.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2011 Dec;18(6):1222-9. doi: 10.3758/s13423-011-0154-1.
The process by which adults develop competence in symbolic mathematics tasks is poorly understood. Nonhuman animals, human infants, and human adults all form nonverbal representations of the approximate numerosity of arrays of dots and are capable of using these representations to perform basic mathematical operations. Several researchers have speculated that individual differences in the acuity of such nonverbal number representations provide the basis for individual differences in symbolic mathematical competence. Specifically, prior research has found that 14-year-old children's ability to rapidly compare the numerosities of two sets of colored dots is correlated with their mathematics achievements at ages 5-11. In the present study, we demonstrated that although when measured concurrently the same relationship holds in children, it does not hold in adults. We conclude that the association between nonverbal number acuity and mathematics achievement changes with age and that nonverbal number representations do not hold the key to explaining the wide variety of mathematical performance levels in adults.
成人在符号数学任务中发展能力的过程还没有被很好地理解。非人类动物、人类婴儿和成年人均能对圆点数组的近似数量形成非言语的表示，并能够使用这些表示来执行基本的数学运算。一些研究人员推测，这种非言语数量表示的个体差异为符号数学能力的个体差异提供了基础。具体来说，先前的研究发现，14 岁儿童快速比较两组彩色圆点数量的能力与他们在 5-11 岁时的数学成绩相关。在本研究中，我们证明了虽然在儿童中同时测量时存在相同的关系，但在成人中并不存在。我们得出结论，非言语数量敏锐度与数学成就之间的关联会随着年龄的变化而变化，并且非言语数量表示并不能解释成年人中各种不同的数学表现水平的关键。
