Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Early number skills represent critical milestones in children's cognitive development and are shaped over years of interacting with quantities and numerals in various contexts. Several connectionist computational models have attempted to emulate how certain number concepts may be learned, represented, and processed in the brain. However, these models mainly used highly simplified inputs and focused on limited tasks. We expand on previous work in two directions: First, we train a model end-to-end on video demonstrations in a synthetic environment with multimodal visual and language inputs. Second, we use a more holistic dataset of 35 tasks, covering enumeration, set comparisons, symbolic digits, and seriation. The order in which the model acquires tasks reflects input length and variability, and the resulting trajectories mostly fit with findings from educational psychology. The trained model also displays symbolic and non-symbolic size and distance effects. Using techniques from interpretability research, we investigate how our attention-based model integrates cross-modal representations and binds them into context-specific associative networks to solve different tasks. We compare models trained with and without symbolic inputs and find that the purely non-symbolic model employs more processing-intensive strategies to determine set size.
Source: Cognitive Science
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13492
Authors: Alice Hein, Klaus Diepold
Institution: Technical University of Munich
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,810
OpenAlex ID: W4402194644