Dillon, M. R., Kannan, H., Dean, J. T., Spelke, E. S., & Duflo, E. (2017).
Cognitive Science in the field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics. Science ,
357 (3646), 47-55.
Publisher's VersionAbstract
Many poor children are underprepared for demanding primary school curricula. Research in cognitive science suggests that school achievement could be improved by preschool pedagogy in which numerate adults engage children’s spontaneous, nonsymbolic mathematical concepts. To test this suggestion, we designed and evaluated a game-based preschool curriculum intended to exercise children’s emerging skills in number and geometry. In a randomized field experiment with 1540 children (average age 4.9 years) in 214 Indian preschools, 4 months of math game play yielded marked and enduring improvement on the exercised intuitive abilities, relative to no-treatment and active control conditions. Math-trained children also showed immediate gains on symbolic mathematical skills but displayed no advantage in subsequent learning of the language and concepts of school mathematics.
dillonetal2017.pdf Dillon*, M. R., Persichetti*, A. S., Spelke, E. S., & Dilks, D. D. (2017).
Places in the brain: Bridging layout and object geometry in scene-selective cortex.
Cerebral Cortex , 1-10.
Publisher's VersionAbstractDiverse animal species primarily rely on sense (left–right) and egocentric distance (proximal–distal) when navigating the environment. Recent neuroimaging studies with human adults show that this information is represented in 2 scene-selective cortical regions—the occipital place area (OPA) and retrosplenial complex (RSC)—but not in a third scene-selective region—the parahippocampal place area (PPA). What geometric properties, then, does the PPA represent, and what is its role in scene processing? Here we hypothesize that the PPA represents relative length and angle, the geometric properties classically associated with object recognition, but only in the context of large extended surfaces that compose the layout of a scene. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation, we found that the PPA is indeed sensitive to relative length and angle changes in pictures of scenes, but not pictures of objects that reliably elicited responses to the same geometric changes in object-selective cortical regions. Moreover, we found that the OPA is also sensitive to such changes, while the RSC is tolerant to such changes. Thus, the geometric information typically associated with object recognition is also used during some aspects of scene processing. These findings provide evidence that scene-selective cortex differentially represents the geometric properties guiding navigation versus scene categorization.
dillonpersichettietal2017.pdf