Neural Activity during Natural Viewing of Sesame Street Statistically Predicts Test Scores in Early Childhood

Abstract

Neural activity that is evoked naturalistically in children during educational television viewing can be used to predict math and verbal knowledge.

Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians

“…This 5-min fMRI scan is described in detail elsewhere (20). For present purposes, only two contrasts were used: language processing (sentence reading plus sentence listening relative to rest) and mental calculation (mental processing of simple subtraction problems, such as 7 − 2, presented visually or auditorily, and contrasted to the processing of nonnumerical visual or auditory sentences of equivalent duration and complexity).…”

“…Additionally, a bilateral inferior temporal region is activated by the sight of number symbols, such as Arabic numerals, but not by visually similar letters (18). Those regions lie outside of classical language areas, and several functional MRI (fMRI) studies have confirmed a double dissociation between the areas involved in number sense and language (19,20). Only a small part of our arithmetic knowledge, namely the rote memory for arithmetic facts, encoded in linguistic form (16,21).…”

How do symbolic and non-symbolic numerical magnitude processing skills relate to individual differences in children's mathematical skills? A review of evidence from brain and behavior

“…In other words, those children who exhibited a larger symbolic ratio effect on activity in the left IPS also displayed relatively stronger performance on the standardized tests of speeded arithmetic. In another set of recent studies (Cantlon & Li, 2013;Emerson & Cantlon, 2012), children viewed educational videos (Sesame Street) that had mathematical content, while their brain activity was recorded using fMRI. The degree of activity coupling (functional connectivity) between frontal and parietal brain regions during the viewing of these clips as well as how similar the brain activation of children was to that of a group of adults was found to be related to standardized measures of children's mathematics achievement.…”

Are Measures of Transfer Effects Missing the Target?

“…Already, studies have shown that analyzing brain activity during the full length of watching a movie allows for a more accurate prediction of academic performance (Valkanova et al 2014;Cantlon and Li 2013) as well as increased accuracy in detecting individual patterns of functional connectivity (Vanderwal et al 2017) compared to measuring brain activity during rest or an experimental task. Artificial intelligence, facial expression and eye tracking, portable head scans, virtual reality, and filming behavior are just examples of methods that will allow studying and analyzing participants in more naturalistic settings, minimizing confounding factors and enabling a richer signal.…”