Rebecca Merkley

Carleton University · Department of Cognitive Science

The cognitive mechanisms underpinning the well-established relationship between inhibitory control and early maths skills remain unclear. We hypothesized that a specific aspect of inhibitory control drives its association with distinct math skills in very young children: the ability to ignore stimulus dimensions that are in conflict with task-relev...

Traditional models developed within cognitive psychology suggest that attention is deployed flexibly and irrespective of differences in expertise with to-be-attended stimuli. However, everyday environments are inherently multisensory and observers differ in familiarity with particular unisensory representations (e.g., number words, in contrast with...

The theory put forward by Leibovich et al. of how children acquire a sense of number does not specify the mechanisms through which cognitive control plays a role in this process. We argue that visual attention and number word knowledge influence each other over development and contribute to the development of the concept of number.

A child’s home environment has been shown to be related to the development of early numeracy skills in some countries. However, significant relationships between home learning environment and math achievement have not consistently been found, and likely vary across different cultural and socio-political contexts. Here we explored the home environme...

School readiness is highly salient in South Africa (SA), a country with extreme and persistent inequities that undermine early childhood development. The aim of this short-term longitudinal study was to identify social ecological factors influencing school readiness in young children from low-income settings in Cape Town, SA. Participants were 152...

Executive functions (EFs) in early childhood are predictors of later developmental outcomes and school readiness. Much of the research on EFs and their psychosocial correlates has been conducted in high‐income, minority world countries, which represent a small and biased portion of children globally. The aim of this study is to examine EFs among ch...

This qualitative study explored caregivers' perceptions of factors influencing early childhood development in low‐income, urban South African settings, from a social ecological perspective. Individual interviews were conducted with 15 caregivers of 3–5‐year‐old children; a reflexive thematic analysis approach was adopted. In the family and home con...

The Give-N (give-a-number) task has become a popular assessment of children’s number word learning since Wynn’s (1990; 1992) seminal work 30 years ago. Using the Give-N task, numerous studies have shown that children learn the first few number words slowly and effortfully, before they understand how counting represents number. We conducted a system...

The meaning of numbers is a difficult concept for young children to grasp. They have to learn that numbers don’t refer to any property that an individual object can have, such as color, but refer to an abstract relation between sets of objects, set size. Here, we tested whether children could learn number words from examples of sets that support in...

The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...

Which dimension of a set of objects is more salient to young children: number or size? The 'Build-A-Train' task was developed and used to examine whether children spontaneously use a number or physical size approach on an un-cued matching task. In the Build-A-Train task, an experimenter assembles a train using one to five blocks of a particular len...

Domain-general skills such as executive functions (EFs), and domain-specific skills such as non-symbolic number sense and symbolic understanding are often pitted against each other as predictors of emerging maths. Here we aimed to investigate early childhood relations between these foundational skills with a balanced, longitudinal design. One hundr...

Research in cognitive development has highlighted that early numeracy skills are associated with later math achievement, suggesting that these skills should be targeted in early math education. Here we tested whether tools used by researchers to assess mathematical thinking could be useful in the classroom. This paper describes a collaborative proj...

Background: Research into numerical cognition has contributed to a large body of knowledge on how children learn and perform mathematics. This knowledge has the potential to inform mathematics education. Unfortunately, numerical cognition research and mathematics education remain disconnected from one another, lacking the proper infrastructure to...

Research has shown that two different, though related, ways of representing magnitude play foundational roles in the development of numerical and mathematical skills: a nonverbal approximate number system and an exact symbolic number system. While there have been numerous studies suggesting that the two systems are important predictors of math achi...

Research in cognitive development has highlighted that early numeracy skills are associated with later math achievement, suggesting that these skills should be targeted in early math education. Here we tested whether tools used by researchers to assess mathematical thinking could be useful in the classroom. This paper describes a collaborative proj...

A region in the posterior inferior temporal gyrus (pITG) is thought to be specialized for processing Arabic numerals, but fMRI studies that compared passive viewing of numerals to other character types (e.g., letters and novel characters) have not found evidence of numeral preference in the pITG. However, recent studies showed that the engagement o...

Research has shown that two different, though related ways of representing magnitude play foundational roles in the learning of classroom math abilities: a non-verbal, approximate number system (ANS) and an exact, symbolic number system (SNS). While there have been a multitude of studies suggesting that the ANS and SNS are important predictors of m...

The influential triple-code model of number representation proposed that there are three distinct brain regions for three different numerical representations: verbal words, visual digits and abstract magnitudes. It was hypothesized that the region for visual digits, known as the number form area, would be in ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC),...

Developmental cognitive neuroscience highlights the importance of interactions between children and their environment. As young children spend increasing time in childcare, it is key to investigate the impact of “maths‐talk” and maths provisions in preschools. Qualitative insights from early educators indicate a greater bias toward counting activit...

This study reports on the design, implementation, and effects of a 16-week (25-hour) mathematics Professional Development (PD) model for K-3 educators (N=45) and their students (N=180). A central goal of the PD was to better integrate numerical cognition research and mathematics education. The results of the first iteration (Year 1), indicated that...

Frontiers for Young Minds: New Discovery The world is a distracting place – full of shapes and colors, sounds, and smells that constantly excite our senses. Sometimes, things that distract us can stimulate multiple senses at once. When the TV is switched on while we are trying to read, moving images on the screen are accompanied by sounds. But you...

In this commentary, we provide a discussion of the findings by Wang, Odic, Halberda, and Feigenson recently published in the 99). The article by Wang and colleagues claims to have revealed a causal link between the so-called ''approximate number system " (ANS) and young children's symbolic math abilities. We question this assertion of a causal link...

It is not yet understood how children acquire the meaning of numerical symbols and most existing research has focused on the role of approximate non-symbolic representations of number in this process (see Piazza, (Trends in Cognitive 14(12):542–551, 2010). However, numerical symbols necessitate an understanding of both order and magnitude, therefor...

How does the multi-sensory nature of stimuli influence information processing? Cognitive systems with limited selective attention can elucidate these processes. Six-year-olds, 11-yearolds and 20-year-olds engaged in a visual search task that required them to detect a pre-defined colored shape under conditions of low or high visual perceptual load....

Numerical symbols are thought to be mapped onto preexisting nonsymbolic representations of number. A growing body of evidence suggests that nonsymbolic numerical processing is significantly influenced by the associated visual properties of continuous quantity (e.g., surface area, density), but their role in the acquisition of novel symbols is unkno...

In both behavioural and brain-imaging studies, numerical magnitude comparison tasks have been used to glean insights into the processing and representation of numerical magnitude. The present study examined the extent to which eye movement data can be used to investigate the neurocognitive processes underlying numerical magnitude processing. Twenty...