Our Ability to Understand Fractions Is Innate

Over the years, teachers and students alike have complained that mathematical fractions are a very difficult concept to master in schools, and that the mental abstractionism involved in operating with these concepts is too high. It was not until recently that scientists proved that the human mind was, in fact, attuned to the very concept of fractions, and that the brain even had two distinct regions in which it processed information related to fractions. Investigations have revealed that the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the prefrontal cortex, which deal with whole numbers, also play a role in understanding fractions.

“Fractions are often considered a major stumbling block in math education. This new study challenges the notion that children must undergo a qualitative shift in order to understand fractions and use them in calculations. The findings instead suggest that fractions are built upon the system that is employed to represent basic numerical magnitude in the brain,” expert Daniel Ansari, PhD, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, explains the numerical cognition in children and adults. Ansari has not been part of the latest research, which has been published in the April 8th issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

According to the new paper, adults have an innate inclination to understanding fractions. Admittedly, it doesn't say much about children, but experts are convinced that they could devise a new method of teaching mathematics based on the newly published finds.

German researchers at the University of Tubingen, led by Simon Jacob, MD, and Andreas Nieder, PhD, also the authors of the new paper, have used a technique known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Adaptation (fMRA) for their studies. This allowed them to look at the brain of study participants, while the subjects watched a screen on which fractions flashed for a short period of time and then were replaced by others.

The goal of the research was to identify any and all regions of the brain that showed decreased activity, also called adaptation, to the same stimuli, if the fractions were displayed again and again. The method the German scientists applied was very ingenious – the first set of fractions were roughly equivalent to 1/6, and were shown to the participants many times. Then, as the experiment progressed, the team started introducing fractions whose values differed from 1/6, and noticed that activity in the IPS and the prefrontal cortex, which declined in the first stage of the study, started rising again.

They also noticed that the larger the difference between the result of the fraction and the original value of roughly 1/6, the more activity was recorded in each test subject's brain. This could only mean that people processed the information directly in their brain, as there was no time for them to consciously assess the results of the fractions they saw. “These experiments change the way we should think about fractions. We have shown that our highly-trained brains represent fractions intuitively, a result that could influence the teaching of arithmetic and mathematics in schools,” Jacob says.