Toddlers and counting

[Yelena McManaman]

Remember an article Maria shared with us last week, the one about a study that found that babies understand counting rules at a very early age. Here's the link - http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20142-toddlers-know-counting-rules-at-18-months.html

Basically, a dozen or so 18-month olds were shown 2 videos: "In the video, a finger pointed to six fish stickers one at a time while a voice counted up to six. Next, the count up to six was repeated, but this time the finger alternated between two of the six fish on the screen."

 

The result was that "18-month-olds looked at the correct count for 1 second longer than the incorrect count."

 

This was so interesting that I e-mailed Maria with some questions and she suggested opening a separate topic for this discussion.

 

For example, what if the 1-second difference is because in the second test (alternating between the two fish) the pattern of movement becomes too predictable and therefore less interesting for toddlers? What if the sequence of tests was reversed and the "finger alternating between two fish" video was shown before and not after the "finger pointing to six fish one at a time" video?

 

So what are your thoughts about this study and its results? What would be some ways of further testing this hypothesis (that very young children have some sort of innate understanding of counting rules)?

 

- Yelena

 

[Maria Droujkova]

 Can people in this group please try this and share what you see?

It is somewhat hard to measure one-second differences in attention, though. How can we accomplish it at home?


Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

 

[Mick Weiss]

My son is around this age and I can tell you that he counts objects.

[Mick Weiss]

The reason that I know my son can count is because he took the balls on
the pool table and when he put them in the hole he counted "eins" (one)
then "zwei" (two) etc.

I saw some interesting research done at the Universit�t Heidelberg in
Germany. Prof. Sabina Pauen and some other researchers took a group of
toddlers and wanted to see if they can think in categories (can they
differentiate between animals and machinery).

The researchers showed a video where a girl always looked at machinery
(a car or a truck or a tractor), to a 1 yr old and after 10 video clips
switched to a video where the girl in the video looked at a fox. The
child was surprised. Attached is a screenshot from the video and the
child's reaction. Children also concentrate more when they see something
that they didn't expect.

- Mick

On 2/24/11 8:02 AM, Maria Droujkova wrote: