Past research suggests that individual differences in the acuity of the approximate number system (ANS) are associated with children's math abilities. However, some recent work has argued that these associations can be explained through shared reliance on inhibitory control. Here, we test this claim in two separate experiments. In Experiment 1, forty-two 5- and 6-year-old children completed a non-symbolic number comparison task to assess ANS acuity as well as standardized experimenter-administered assessments for inhibitory control and math ability. Children's accuracy in the number comparison task and scores on the math assessment were significantly correlated, even when controlling for performance on the inhibitory control task. To rule out that our findings were due to the nature of the inhibitory control task, in Experiment 2, we administered a different, computerized inhibitory control task, and similar tasks to assess ANS acuity and math ability as in Experiment 1 to children aged 3-6 years (N = 169). Similar to the result of Experiment 1, we found that associations between accuracy in the number comparison task and math ability persisted when controlling for performance on the inhibitory control task. Together these results suggest that ANS acuity is uniquely associated with early math abilities, independent of the effect of inhibitory control at least in children from middle- to high-SES families.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 June 2015.
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