Short‐term numerosity training promotes symbolic arithmetic in children with developmental dyscalculia: The mediating role of visual form perception

Abstract

Studies have shown that numerosity‐based arithmetic training can promote arithmetic learning in typically developing children as well as children with developmental dyscalculia (DD), but the cognitive mechanism underlying this training effect remains unclear. The main aim of the current study was to examine the role of visual form perception in arithmetic improvement through an 8‐day numerosity training for DD children. Eighty DD children were selected from four Chinese primary schools. They were randomly divided into the intervention and control groups. The intervention group received training on an apple‐collecting game, whereas the control group received an English dictation task. Children's cognitive and arithmetic performances were assessed before and after training. The results showed that the intervention group showed a significant improvement in arithmetic performance, approximate number system (ANS) acuity, and visual form perception, but not in spatial processing and sentence comprehension. The control group showed no significant improvement in any cognitive ability. Mediation analysis further showed that training‐related improvement in arithmetic performance was fully mediated by the improvement in visual form perception. The results suggest that short‐term numerosity training enhances the arithmetic performance of DD children by improving their visual form perception.

Increased structural covariance in brain regions for number processing and memory in children with developmental dyscalculia

“…It plays a role in spatial navigation, mnemonic processing, and control of the response to emotional stress. In fact, it has been shown that DD demonstrate problems with spatial navigation and spatial processing (e.g., visual crowing: identifying objects when surrounded by other simular items) related to memory and inhibition (Castaldi et al., 2020; Szucs et al., 2013), which appear to be still present after numerosity‐based arithmetic training (Cheng et al., 2020). From our results and based on the recorded behavioral data, we cannot comment on why the subiculum shows lower SC in DD.…”

Persistent Effects of Musical Training on Mathematical Skills of Children With Developmental Dyscalculia

“…Consequently, in recent years, approaches for remediation have been developed to enhance numerical cognition, for example, computer-assisted interventions (Kucian et al, 2011;Syah et al, 2015;Michels et al, 2018;Cheng et al, 2019), board games (Elofsson et al, 2016), and tutoring programs, i.e., the combination of conceptual features of numerical knowledge with counting skills (Iuculano et al, 2015), and even attentional training (Ashkenazi and Henik, 2012). These interventions produced improvements in the numerical cognition capacity, however, the effect was restricted to isolated numerical abilities such as number sense (Wilson et al, 2006), number line (Kucian et al, 2011;Käser et al, 2013;Elofsson et al, 2016), or number comprehension (Fuchs et al, 2013;Syah et al, 2015).…”

Neural association between non‐verbal number sense and arithmetic fluency

“…In contrast, a domain‐general hypothesis provides an alternative explanation for the association between numerosity processing and arithmetic fluency from the viewpoint of general cognitive processing. Visual perception, as measured by a geometric figure‐matching task, has emerged as a critical general cognitive mechanism that is shared between non‐verbal number sense and arithmetic fluency (Cheng et al, 2020; Cui, Zhang, Cheng, Li, & Zhou, 2017; Wang, Sun, & Zhou, 2016; Zhou, Hu, Yuan, Gu, & Li, 2020; Zhou, Wei, Zhang, Cui, & Chen, 2015). For example, Zhou et al (2015) showed that visual perception measured with such a task could fully account for the association between non‐verbal number sense and arithmetic fluency.…”