ABSTRACT
Number sense is one of the core domains of human cognition. From their very earliest years, most children develop an intuitive sense of number without formal instruction or conscious effort. Small babies can notice when an extra dot is added to (or removed from) a simple pattern and 3-year-olds can compare two groups of items and choose the largest set. Most 5-and 6-year-old children can give surprisingly accurate answers to questions such as 64 – 13 without formal working out. The children's performance on this task is an excellent predictor on their success (or otherwise) in mathematics later in their schooling (Gilmore, McCarthy and Spelke, 2007, 2010). It is recognized that young children who lag behind their peers in skills such as accurate estimation of relative size are more likely to be identified as pupils with dyscalculia at a later stage.
