Research for “number sense” assessment in mathematics study is conducted at BelSU

The specialists of BelSU Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Neurotechnology and the Institute of Psychology of Russian Academy of Sciences based their research on the analysis of non-symbolic number sense inherent in humans and some animals – the ability to approximately estimate the number of objects without resorting to their counting.

As reported by Marina Lobaskova, a senior researcher of the Laboratory of Age Psychogenetics of the Institute of Psychology of Russian Academy of Sciences, the supervisor of the FFFI grant on “Cognitive and Psychophysiological Mechanisms of Number Sense”, the research team of the Laboratory of Age Psychogenetics of the Institute of Psychology and BelSU Research and Project Center for Cognitive Neurosciences and Neurotechnology is analyzing the mechanisms that “activate” the unsymbolic sense of number.

According to Yulia Marakshina, a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Age Psychogenetics of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an experimental paradigm for measuring temporal and spatial characteristics of brain activity in estimating numbers is novel in the world and based on up-to-date methods for brain activity recording – electroencephalography and NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy). The research is supported by a grant of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFFI).