Research

Maths in the mind

The Department of Psychology is pioneering a new field of developmental cognitive science investigating our mathematical abilities.

Over the past ten years, Dr Claudia Uller has been investigating how this ability develops from infancy, and evolutionarily across species, using a variety of methodologies. Dr Uller explained: 'Maths is an excellent field of investigation in cognitive psychology, in particular because of the unique intrinsic relationship between number and language in humans.' However, because we express numbers through language, does it mean animals have no concept of number? What about young pre-linguistic babies - do they understand number?

As part of her research, Dr Uller developed experiments with babies and monkeys and found that both have a spontaneous capacity for small numbers, up to three. Studies by Dr Uller and other laboratories show that babies 'go for more'. In one study, one cookie was placed in a bowl and two in another. In all cases the babies reached for the bowl with more. When repeated with two and three cookies the results were the same. However, place four cookies in one bowl and three in another and the results became random - the baby can not tell which bowl has more. Monkeys were subjected to the same trials and had the same outcome, demonstrating a spontaneous, non linguistic ability to differentiate between small numbers in both.

Dr Uller extended her research to find out if this ability was confined to primates by working with an ancient species of amphibians, red-backed salamanders. When tested in experiments that closely match the baby and monkey experiments, the salamanders performed comparably well going for more when sets were smaller than four. 'This result,' Dr Uller explained, 'is important to our better understanding of where human cognition comes from; the ability to discriminate between more or less is not learnt, it is a spontaneous cognitive ability, presumably present from birth.'

The results also demonstrated our ability to estimate numbers. 'In all experiments, the results became random when four items were introduced suggesting that when it comes to numbers, we have two different cognitive systems. The first of these is limited, and uses a mechanism that identifies the number of objects in a small set. However, when more than four objects are introduced, another system is enrolled, which encodes information contained in larger sets 'ad infinitum'. This mechanism has been said to account for our 'counting' and estimating abilities.'

What is clear from Dr Uller's research is that maths is important for survival, she explained: 'There is great survival value in knowing if there is more food in one area than another - or more predators than friends.'

These experiments have opened up wider fields of investigation for Dr Uller: 'There are still questions which need to be explored. What do these results say about number systems in babies and primates? What impact does language have on numerical ability - is language merely a bonus in expressing numbers?'

National centre for E-social science

The expertise of the UK Data Archive is supporting a major project to establish a National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS).

Funded by an initial three-year budget of £1.5 million from the Economic and Social Research Council, the project will be co-ordinated by the University of Manchester.

Its vision is of a globally-connected scholarly community made up of virtual co-laboratories aimed at promoting the highest quality scientific research.

The realisation of this vision rests on the development of an IT infrastructure that will enable flexible, secure, co-ordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources.

It can be seen as a natural and potentially massive extension of existing web services.

It offers potentially great opportunities for social science by broadening access to existing data repositories; developing new forms of analysis software and providing increased remote access to computational facilities.

The NCeSS will revolve around a co-ordinating Hub at Manchester, which will be established on 1 April, supported by the Essex-based UK Data Archive. From April 2005, it will have a set of research-based Nodes distributed across the UK.

The Hub will act as the central resource base for e-social science issues and activities in the UK, integrating them with ESRC research methods and initiatives and the existing e-science programme.

The Hub will provide a one-stop shop for awareness-raising, expertise, training, technical infrastructure, data resources, computer facilities and user support for e-social science research.

The Nodes will each pursue a designated part of a wide-ranging research agenda. The task of the Nodes is to develop grid technologies and apply them to social science research problems.

A series of demonstrator projects and consultancies have been commissioned by the ESRC on e-social science. Details are available from the NCeSS web site: www.ncess.org. Other aspects of ESRC's e-science strategy can be found on the ESRC web site at: www.esrc.ac.uk/esrccontent/researchfunding/esciencecentre.asp.

Also in the printed March edition of Wyvern: