An MRI Study on Effects of Math Education on Brain Development Using Multi-Instance Contrastive Learning

Abstract

This paper explores whether mathematical education has effects on brain development from the perspective of brain MRIs. While biochemical changes in the left middle front gyrus region of the brain have been investigated, we proposed to classify students by using MRIs from the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) region that was left untouched in the previous study. On the cropped IPS regions, the proposed model developed popular contrastive learning (CL) to solve the problem of multi-instance representation learning. The resulted data representations were then fed into a linear neural network to identify whether students were in the math group or the non-math group. Experiments were conducted on 123 adolescent students, including 72 math students and 51 non-math students. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 90.24 % for student classification, gaining more than 5% improvements compared to the classical CL frame. Our study provides not only a multi-instance extension to CL and but also an MRI insight into the impact of mathematical studying on brain development.

Identifying Non-Math Students from Brain MRIs with an Ensemble Classifier Based on Subspace-Enhanced Contrastive Learning

“…Studies have shown that mathematics education is associated with IPS and MFG regions [ 3 ]. In our previous work [ 31 ], we proposed MiCL to study the influence of the intraparietal Sulcus (IPS) region on mathematics education. This work analyzes how the MFG area affects students’ mathematics education.…”

Learner perception on tactile materials as a correlate of performance in mathematics: The case of Thika high school for the Blind, Kiambu County, Kenya

“…At individual level, Mathematics supports analytical thinking and logical reasoning processes, improves problem-solving skills, and enhances critical thinking and creativity (Hagan et al, 2020). Mathematical learning has been linked to significant improvements in the brain's plasticity, various cognitive functions, emotional health, overall life quality, and development indices (Zhang et al, 2021). Besides, Mathematics knowledge is essential for the learning of many other subjects, opens multiple career paths to an individual, and is a pre-requisite for several courses.…”