An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty—a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals. Practically every animal that ...

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 ...

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 ...

Many of us struggle with mathematical concepts, yet we’re all equipped with an innate “number sense,” or numerosity. Thanks to a strange group of “number neurons” buried in the visual cortex, human ...

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 ...

When Christian Agrillo runs number-related experiments in his lab, he wishes his undergraduate subjects good luck. For certain tests, that’s about all he says. Giving instructions to the people would ...

Brian Butterworth is on a crusade to understand the number deficit called dyscalculia — and to help those who have it. In the mid-1980s, Paul Moorcraft, then a war correspondent, journeyed with a film ...

We know a lot about how babies learn to talk, and youngsters learn to read. Now scientists are unraveling the earliest building blocks of math — and what children know about numbers as they begin ...