色狗导航

[14:00-15:00] Leverhulme Lecture (40 mins Presentation + 20 mins Q&A)

Helena Osana, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Understanding One: Challenges in Children’s Understanding of Units

This lecture focuses on children’s understanding of units from early counting to more advanced concepts involving measurement and composite units. It reviews research on how children construct the idea of “one” as both a countable entity and a unit that can be iterated and nested within higher-order structures. Common difficulties are examined, including treating collections of units as wholes, coordinating multiple units, and understanding number as a structure of embedded units. Together, these perspectives provide a nuanced account of why unit concepts are persistently challenging.

[15:05-16:00] Presentation 1 (40 mins Presentation + 15 mins Q&A)

Marie-Josee Bisson, Department of Mathematics Education, 色狗导航 

Cross-linguistic influences on word learning: Implications for acquiring and processing number words in another language.

My research investigates how people learn new words in another language and what facilitates this process. I have identified key factors influencing successful learning, including item-related variables such as cross-linguistic orthographic similarity, which facilitates initial form-meaning mapping (Bisson 2023).  Learning context also matters (e.g., incidental vs. intentional learning; Bisson, in press), as do individual-differences predictors such as working memory and phonological abilities and their interaction with learning context (Bisson et al., 2021). In this presentation, I will summarise my prior research and looking ahead, introduce a project examining the impact of cross-linguistic similarity on number word learning. The proposed work sits within my broader programme of research on language learning but allows a specific look at the earliest stages of number word learning, linking language research to mathematical cognition. 

[16:05-17:00] Presentation 2 (40 mins Presentation + 15 mins Q&A)

Sylvia Gattas, Learning Brain Lab, UCL, Institute of Education

Autonomic Regulation and Attentional Maintenance Coupling During Novel Symbolic Learning in Children Aged 4–8 Years

Developing the ability to map symbolic meaning onto magnitudes and order is highly dependent on attentional maintenance and is foundational to early mathematics, underpinning numeral encoding, recognition and arithmetic operations. A growing body of evidence shows that autonomic regulation, indexed by heart rate variability, supports the prefrontal regulatory capacity underlying sustained attention, executive function, and cognitive performance, processes crucial in symbolic development (Thayer and Lane, 2000; Forte et al., 2019; Laborde et al., 2024). Yet the neuroautonomic mechanism supporting such intricate attentional maintenance and symbolic learning processes in young children remains poorly understood.

The present study examined whether dynamic autonomic regulation, indexed by high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), predicts attentional maintenance and performance during novel symbolic learning in 44 children aged 4 – 8 years (M = 6.07 years). Children completed a symbol-learning task requiring successive encoding and testing of novel symbol-sound pairings, while continuous electrocardiography was recorded and segmented into 2,289 thirty-second HF-HRV epochs.

Analyses revealed that children's regulatory volatility was stable across learning and testing phases (Bayesian Spearman ρ = 0.765, BF鈧佲個 = 53,541), indicating that autonomic lability functions as a trait-like regulatory characteristic rather than a context-driven response. State HF-HRV during learning predicted concurrent attentional maintenance accuracy over and above resting regulatory ability (typically labelled as trait level allostasis; F(4,20) = 7.45, p = .0008, R² = .60), and higher-performing children showed significantly greater mean HF-HRV during the encoding phase, a finding that replicated across two performance measures, attentional maintenance accuracy during learning and test accuracy following learning (Wilcoxon Ws = 98-104, ps = .029-.033). Generalised additive mixed modelling, which uses penalised regression splines to estimate the functional form of HRV trajectories without imposing linearity, further revealed that while children's overall regulatory volatility reflects a stable individual characteristic, the temporal unfolding of autonomic activity was sensitive to evaluative demands, with testing but not learning producing systematic nonlinear HRV dynamics across epochs (p = .004, edf = 2.75). Finally, physiological variability was decoupled from children's self-reported affect throughout (BF鈧�鈧� = 3.6-5.5), suggesting that this regulatory activity operates below the level of conscious emotional awareness in children of this age.

These findings show that autonomic regulation supports attentional allocation during symbolic encoding before deliberate regulatory strategies (e.g., reappraisal or EF reliant processes) are available, and that individual differences in regulatory capacity are both stable and functionally consequential for learning outcomes. Understanding the dynamic coupling between physiological regulation and attentional performance during early symbolic learning has direct implications for how we conceptualise the biological foundations of readiness to learn in early mathematics education, and for designing task structures and learning environments that are sensitive to children's developmental stages and biological mechanisms.