Book Description

Humans process quantity information without the aid of language or symbols to guide a variety of everyday life decisions. The cognitive system that supports this intuitive skill is often referred to as the approximate number system (ANS). It has been argued that the ANS serves as the foundation of the formal symbolic number system—mathematics. Abundant empirical evidence is supportive of this view: acuity of the ANS is positively correlated with symbolic math performance, training of the ANS may cause improvements in symbolic math performance, and the ANS and symbolic number processing may share a common neural underpinning. However, recently several theories and empirical data cast doubt on the role of the ANS in symbolic math processing. This e-book aims to advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the overlap between the ANS and mathematics.