Duke University neuroscientists Elizabeth Brannon and Ariel Starr test a rudimentary understanding of numbers in infants called a "primitive number sense." When looking at two collections of dots ...

Brannon is also exploring the macaque's sense of an empty set, what we'd call zero with our linguistically intensive sense of number. The monkeys are more likely to confuse an empty set with a 1 or a ...

A new study suggests that the strength of an infant's innate sense of numerical quantities can be predictive of that child's mathematical abilities three years later. Babies who are good at telling ...

Humans and many other animals have an innate ability to quickly sense which of two groups contains the largest number of objects, a skill that is thought to be related to other mathematical abilities.

Students in Melissa Williams' kindergarten class at the Westminster School in Atlanta, Georgia, practice connecting quantities to written numbers — a key part of number sense. Credit: Holly Korbey for ...

Humans have an inborn, intuitive grasp of numbers that varies from one person to the next and is closely linked to advanced math skills, according to a study. In experiments with teenagers in the ...

A child’s ability to understand and manipulate sets of numbers in 1st grade predicts how well he or she will succeed in the math required both in secondary school and for day-to-day living, according ...