ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises what research has found about the development of 'number awareness' in typical infants. It highlights a range of important perceptual skills that underpin learning about number that exists before counting. Newborns immediately notice when there is more than one thing and can also distinguish between small groups of up to four. Stanislas Dehaene is a neuroscientist who describes intuitive number sense as the biological beginnings of maths. He acknowledges the foundation processes begin with sensory information in the brain's parietal lobe, which integrates visual and spatial thinking. However, to become ideas that can be expressed either in verbal language or symbolically as numerals, the perceptual number sense has to be connected to other brain circuits that we use to express conceptual thinking – and he suggests that thinking about number uses three coding systems that need to be integrated.
