An Event-Related Potentials Investigation Of Mathematical Cognition Of Children From Different Socioecnomic Status

The development of cognition, emotion and personalities in children, especially in early childhood, is much influenced by the environment. Family as the environment that children contact with at the earliest is very important for children’s development. A series of behavioral studies on development of number sense indicated that children from low socioeconomic status (low-SES) are more confronted with the difficulties in the capacities of counting, quantitative relation and magnitude processing (Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni,&Locuniak,2008). Moreover, the researches on children’s general cognitive function manifested that it’s more likely that the attentional function exists some abnormality in the early stage of cognitive processing in children from low-SES and that children from low-SES have more cognitive damages in many neural cognitive systems such as left perisylvian/language system, prefrontal/executive system and medial temporal/memory system (Noble et al.,2005; Noble et al.,2007; Faraha et al.,2006). However, these studies didn’t explore the influences form socioeconomic status on children’s neural mechanism of mathematical cognition directly. Therefore, this study used the event-related potentials (ERPs) to compare the differences of brain potentials when performing the number comparison task and the simple addition between the children from low-SES and the children from middle to high-SES at the same age, and to deeply analysis the impact of the socioeconomic status on children’s mathematical cognition from the view of neural mechanism.This study included two experiments both with ERPs. Experiment1:32primary school students in2nd grade from different SES (low-SES, middle to high-SES) was selected (half in each SES group), using the symbol number comparison task presenting with Arabic digit as the experiment task, to examine the differences on brain potentials of magnitude representation between these two group children. Experiment2:28primary school students in2nd grade from different SES was selected (half in each SES group), using the simple mental addition task the as the experiment task, to explore the differences between these two group children on brain potentials in the process of mental calculation (number transformation and number operation) and the process of solution judgment (retrieval of arithmetic facts). The current study reached following conclusions:(1) In the number comparison processing, the ERPs on frontal and central areas is more negative for low-SES children than middle to high-SES children at about100-140ms after stimulus onset;(2) At the time went on, started at about200ms (200-250ms,250-300ms), the amplitude of ERPs on frontal and central areas is smaller for low-SES children than middle to high-SES children;(3) In mental addition processing, low-SES children presented with the problem size effect (PSE) but with inverse form at about550-650ms after stimulus onset, and an absence of PSE at about720-820ms. At about820-1000ms, low-SES children presented with a same PSE comparing with the other group.(4) In the processing of solution judgment, same as the other group, low-SES children’s brain potentials presented with the arithmetic incongruous effect at about280-420ms and500-700ms.