Dominic Gibson - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Dominic Gibson
Journal of experimental psychology. General, Feb 8, 2024
ly to a property of the set of elephants (Papafragou & Musolino, 2002). To make matters worse... more ly to a property of the set of elephants (Papafragou & Musolino, 2002). To make matters worse, “two” can have multiple, even conflicting meanings. For example, when counting two blocks, a child must reconcile the fact that in the phrase, “one, two,” the word “two” represents both a tag for the second object and the total number of objects in that set. So why should one be interested in how children come to comprehend the word “two”? First, the very properties that make numerals, like two, difficult to learn also make them valuable tools for mentally organizing and interpreting the world. Number words help us reason about sets; even better, they allow us to reason about exact sets, with which we can perform any number of precise mathematical operations. They provide us with a system of symbolic number – a series of symbols (numerals) that we can use to represent exact countable quantities. A closer look at those beings who possess symbolic number language and those who do not confirms the importance of knowing a count list when performing a variety of quantity-based tasks. While preverbal infants and animals are able to form nonsymbolic number representations and perform a few basic computations with these representations, they
Developmental Science
Researchers have long been interested in the origins of humans’ understanding of symbolic number,... more Researchers have long been interested in the origins of humans’ understanding of symbolic number, focusing primarily on how children learn the meanings of number words (e.g., “one”, “two”, etc.). However, recent evidence indicates that children learn the meanings of number gestures before learning number words. In the present set of experiments, we ask whether children's early knowledge of number gestures resembles their knowledge of nonsymbolic number. In four experiments, we show that preschool children (n = 139 in total; age M = 4.14 years, SD = 0.71, range = 2.75–6.20) do not view number gestures in the same the way that they view nonsymbolic representations of quantity (i.e., arrays of shapes), which opens the door for the possibility that young children view number gestures as symbolic, as adults and older children do. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/WtVziFN1yuIHighlights Children were more accurate when enumerating briefly‐presented numb...
How do children transition from preverbal conceptions of numerical quantity to a full understandi... more How do children transition from preverbal conceptions of numerical quantity to a full understanding of symbolic number (e.g. number words: one, two, three. etc.)? This is an important question in developmental psychology with serious implications for early childhood education. A surprisingly unspecified aspect of early number development is children's use of cardinal number gestures (e.g. holding up three fingers to indicate "three"). Although it is widely assumed that number gestures play some role in children's early number development (e.g. Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Fuson, 1988), the specifics of this role are not well understood. In three studies, I establish the relevance of number gestures to the acquisition of number words and examine children's knowledge of number gestures in relation to their developing understanding of number words. Study 1 examined cases in which children's number gestures do not match their spoken number words when labeling sets...
Across six pre-registered studies (N = 1292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific... more Across six pre-registered studies (N = 1292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific Academic), we investigate how face perception along the dimensions of gender/sex and race can vary based on immediate contextual information as well as personal experience. In Studies 1a and 1b we find that when sorting stimuli along a continuum from male to female, cisgender participants sort prototypical gender/sex faces in a bimodal fashion and show less consensus and accuracy at sorting faces of intermediate gender/sex. We replicate and extend these findings to race in Study 2. In Study 3, we test whether sorting patterns may be influenced by pre-existing experiences, and find evidence that transgender/nonbinary participants are more accurate than cisgender heterosexual participants at sorting intermediary faces. Finally, in Studies 4 and 5, we test whether cisgender participants’ perceptions of intermediary faces are influenced by the specific circumstances under which they are ask...
JAMA Network Open
also reported serving as an unpaid expert witness in Center for Gender Advocacy and al v Attorney... more also reported serving as an unpaid expert witness in Center for Gender Advocacy and al v Attorney General of Québec (court file number 500-17-082257-141), a case concerning whether minors should be able to change their gender markers; and she reported serving as an unpaid member of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America LGBTQ National Advisory Council. No other disclosures were reported.
I would like to thank Anna Shusterman who challenged and guided me, and without whom this project... more I would like to thank Anna Shusterman who challenged and guided me, and without whom this project would not have been possible. Thanks to my family: Brendan Gibson, Bill Gibson, and Julia Gibson for their love, support, and constant reminders to save my work to multiple hard drives. Thanks to Kyle MacDonald, Gwynne Hunter, and Barry Finder for taking time away from their own theses to provide insight into mine. I would also like to thank my roommates, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Elise Kaye, and Jordan Brown for the friendship and balance they brought to my life during this experience. Also, thank you to the professors and students that take part in the Cognitive Science Capstone Seminar and continue to enrich my experience at Wesleyan. Finally, thanks to Lauren Feld for constant intellectual, emotional, and nutritional support. When do children first learn that the word “two ” refers to a pair? Traditional number language research suggests that children begin with the belief that “two” m...
Cognitive Foundations for Improving Mathematical Learning, 2019
Abstract The mathematics knowledge children bring to school at the start of kindergarten has been... more Abstract The mathematics knowledge children bring to school at the start of kindergarten has been found to predict their long-term learning trajectories, and this finding has drawn attention to math learning during the preschool years. In this chapter, we focus on early math learning in the home environment, with a particular emphasis on the mathematical talk and cospeech gestures that commonly accompany this talk, probing the relation between these behaviors and children's math outcomes. We also examine the role of math attitudes in early math learning, and particularly how the math anxiety of parents is related to parent-child math interactions, and in turn, how these interactions relate to children's math learning. Finally, we review interventions that show promise in supporting parents’ math interactions with their children as well as children's math learning, and consider issues related to scaling up these interventions.
Cognition, Jan 5, 2018
Learning the cardinal principle (the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of... more Learning the cardinal principle (the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of the whole set) is a major milestone in early mathematics. But researchers disagree about the relationship between cardinal principle knowledge and other concepts, including how counting implements the successor function (for each number word N representing a cardinal value, the next word in the count list represents the cardinal value N + 1) and exact ordering (cardinal values can be ordered such that each is one more than the value before it and one less than the value after it). No studies have investigated acquisition of the successor principle and exact ordering over time, and in relation to cardinal principle knowledge. An open question thus remains: Is the cardinal principle a "gatekeeper" concept children must acquire before learning about succession and exact ordering, or can these concepts develop separately? Preschoolers (N = 127) who knew the cardinal principle (CP-...
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2017
Children with early focal unilateral brain injury show remarkable plasticity in language developm... more Children with early focal unilateral brain injury show remarkable plasticity in language development. However, little is known about how early brain injury influences mathematical learning. Here, we examine early number understanding, comparing cardinal number knowledge of typically developing children (TD) and children with pre-and perinatal lesions (BI) between 42 and 50 months of age. We also examine how this knowledge relates to the number words children hear from their primary caregivers early in life. We find that children with BI, are, on average, slightly behind TD children in both cardinal number knowledge and later mathematical performance, and show slightly slower learning rates than TD children in cardinal number knowledge during the preschool years. We also find that parents' "number talk" to their toddlers predicts later mathematical ability for both TD children and children with BI. These findings suggest a relatively optimistic story in which neural plasticity is at play in children's mathematical development following early brain injury. Further, the effects of early number input suggest that intervening to enrich the number talk that children with BI hear during the preschool years could narrow the math achievement gap.
wesfiles.wesleyan.edu
... Acquiring First Number Words: The Developmental Trajectory of Children's Meanings for T... more ... Acquiring First Number Words: The Developmental Trajectory of Children's Meanings for Two Anna Shusterman, Dominic J. Gibson, Barry Finder Wesleyan ... that children do not understand the exact meaning of two until they are nearly three years old (eg, Wynn, 1992), and ...
Developmental Science, 2018
Journal of Cognition and Development, 2021
ABSTRACT Differences in children’s math knowledge emerge as early as the start of kindergarten, a... more ABSTRACT Differences in children’s math knowledge emerge as early as the start of kindergarten, and persist throughout schooling. Previous research implicates the importance of early parent number talk in the development of math competency. Yet we understand little about the factors that relate to variation in early parent number talk. The current study examined the relation of parent math anxiety and family socioeconomic status (SES) to parent number talk with children under the age of three (n = 36 dyads). For the first time, we show preliminary evidence that parent math anxiety (MA) predicts the amount of number talk children hear at home, beyond differences accounted for by SES. We also found a significant SES by parent MA interaction such that parent MA was predictive of higher-SES parents’ number talk but not that of lower-SES parents. Furthermore, we found that these relations were specific to parents’ cardinal number talk (but not counting), which has been shown to be particularly important in children’s math development.
Cognition, Jan 23, 2015
Before learning the cardinal principle (knowing that the last word reached when counting a set re... more Before learning the cardinal principle (knowing that the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of the whole set), children do not use number words accurately to label most set sizes. However, it remains unclear whether this difficulty reflects a general inability to conceptualize and communicate about number, or a specific problem with number words. We hypothesized that children's gestures might reflect knowledge of number concepts that they cannot yet express in speech, particularly for numbers they do not use accurately in speech (numbers above their knower-level). Number gestures are iconic in the sense that they are item-based (i.e., each finger maps onto one item in a set) and therefore may be easier to map onto sets of objects than number words, whose forms do not map transparently onto the number of items in a set and, in this sense, are arbitrary. In addition, learners in transition with respect to a concept often produce gestures that convey differen...
Child Development, 2014
Despite evidence that young children are sensitive to differences in angle measure, older student... more Despite evidence that young children are sensitive to differences in angle measure, older students frequently struggle to grasp this important mathematical concept. When making judgments about the size of angles, children often rely on erroneous dimensions such as the length of the angles' sides. The present study tested the possibility that this misconception stems from the whole-object word-learning bias by providing a subset of children with a separate label to refer to the whole angle figure. Thirty preschoolers (M = 4.86 years, SD = .53) were tested with a pretest-training-posttest design. At pretest, children showed evidence of the whole-object misconception. After training, children who were given a novel-word label for the whole object improved significantly more than those trained on the meaning of "angle" alone.
... of the Word "Two" by Dominic Gibson Class of 2010 A thesis submitted to the ... Tra... more ... of the Word "Two" by Dominic Gibson Class of 2010 A thesis submitted to the ... Traditional number language research suggests that children begin with the belief that two means a set greater than one (Wynn, 1990, 1992b). In contrast, conceptual research ...
Journal of experimental psychology. General, Feb 8, 2024
ly to a property of the set of elephants (Papafragou & Musolino, 2002). To make matters worse... more ly to a property of the set of elephants (Papafragou & Musolino, 2002). To make matters worse, “two” can have multiple, even conflicting meanings. For example, when counting two blocks, a child must reconcile the fact that in the phrase, “one, two,” the word “two” represents both a tag for the second object and the total number of objects in that set. So why should one be interested in how children come to comprehend the word “two”? First, the very properties that make numerals, like two, difficult to learn also make them valuable tools for mentally organizing and interpreting the world. Number words help us reason about sets; even better, they allow us to reason about exact sets, with which we can perform any number of precise mathematical operations. They provide us with a system of symbolic number – a series of symbols (numerals) that we can use to represent exact countable quantities. A closer look at those beings who possess symbolic number language and those who do not confirms the importance of knowing a count list when performing a variety of quantity-based tasks. While preverbal infants and animals are able to form nonsymbolic number representations and perform a few basic computations with these representations, they
Developmental Science
Researchers have long been interested in the origins of humans’ understanding of symbolic number,... more Researchers have long been interested in the origins of humans’ understanding of symbolic number, focusing primarily on how children learn the meanings of number words (e.g., “one”, “two”, etc.). However, recent evidence indicates that children learn the meanings of number gestures before learning number words. In the present set of experiments, we ask whether children's early knowledge of number gestures resembles their knowledge of nonsymbolic number. In four experiments, we show that preschool children (n = 139 in total; age M = 4.14 years, SD = 0.71, range = 2.75–6.20) do not view number gestures in the same the way that they view nonsymbolic representations of quantity (i.e., arrays of shapes), which opens the door for the possibility that young children view number gestures as symbolic, as adults and older children do. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/WtVziFN1yuIHighlights Children were more accurate when enumerating briefly‐presented numb...
How do children transition from preverbal conceptions of numerical quantity to a full understandi... more How do children transition from preverbal conceptions of numerical quantity to a full understanding of symbolic number (e.g. number words: one, two, three. etc.)? This is an important question in developmental psychology with serious implications for early childhood education. A surprisingly unspecified aspect of early number development is children's use of cardinal number gestures (e.g. holding up three fingers to indicate "three"). Although it is widely assumed that number gestures play some role in children's early number development (e.g. Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Fuson, 1988), the specifics of this role are not well understood. In three studies, I establish the relevance of number gestures to the acquisition of number words and examine children's knowledge of number gestures in relation to their developing understanding of number words. Study 1 examined cases in which children's number gestures do not match their spoken number words when labeling sets...
Across six pre-registered studies (N = 1292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific... more Across six pre-registered studies (N = 1292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific Academic), we investigate how face perception along the dimensions of gender/sex and race can vary based on immediate contextual information as well as personal experience. In Studies 1a and 1b we find that when sorting stimuli along a continuum from male to female, cisgender participants sort prototypical gender/sex faces in a bimodal fashion and show less consensus and accuracy at sorting faces of intermediate gender/sex. We replicate and extend these findings to race in Study 2. In Study 3, we test whether sorting patterns may be influenced by pre-existing experiences, and find evidence that transgender/nonbinary participants are more accurate than cisgender heterosexual participants at sorting intermediary faces. Finally, in Studies 4 and 5, we test whether cisgender participants’ perceptions of intermediary faces are influenced by the specific circumstances under which they are ask...
JAMA Network Open
also reported serving as an unpaid expert witness in Center for Gender Advocacy and al v Attorney... more also reported serving as an unpaid expert witness in Center for Gender Advocacy and al v Attorney General of Québec (court file number 500-17-082257-141), a case concerning whether minors should be able to change their gender markers; and she reported serving as an unpaid member of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America LGBTQ National Advisory Council. No other disclosures were reported.
I would like to thank Anna Shusterman who challenged and guided me, and without whom this project... more I would like to thank Anna Shusterman who challenged and guided me, and without whom this project would not have been possible. Thanks to my family: Brendan Gibson, Bill Gibson, and Julia Gibson for their love, support, and constant reminders to save my work to multiple hard drives. Thanks to Kyle MacDonald, Gwynne Hunter, and Barry Finder for taking time away from their own theses to provide insight into mine. I would also like to thank my roommates, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Elise Kaye, and Jordan Brown for the friendship and balance they brought to my life during this experience. Also, thank you to the professors and students that take part in the Cognitive Science Capstone Seminar and continue to enrich my experience at Wesleyan. Finally, thanks to Lauren Feld for constant intellectual, emotional, and nutritional support. When do children first learn that the word “two ” refers to a pair? Traditional number language research suggests that children begin with the belief that “two” m...
Cognitive Foundations for Improving Mathematical Learning, 2019
Abstract The mathematics knowledge children bring to school at the start of kindergarten has been... more Abstract The mathematics knowledge children bring to school at the start of kindergarten has been found to predict their long-term learning trajectories, and this finding has drawn attention to math learning during the preschool years. In this chapter, we focus on early math learning in the home environment, with a particular emphasis on the mathematical talk and cospeech gestures that commonly accompany this talk, probing the relation between these behaviors and children's math outcomes. We also examine the role of math attitudes in early math learning, and particularly how the math anxiety of parents is related to parent-child math interactions, and in turn, how these interactions relate to children's math learning. Finally, we review interventions that show promise in supporting parents’ math interactions with their children as well as children's math learning, and consider issues related to scaling up these interventions.
Cognition, Jan 5, 2018
Learning the cardinal principle (the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of... more Learning the cardinal principle (the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of the whole set) is a major milestone in early mathematics. But researchers disagree about the relationship between cardinal principle knowledge and other concepts, including how counting implements the successor function (for each number word N representing a cardinal value, the next word in the count list represents the cardinal value N + 1) and exact ordering (cardinal values can be ordered such that each is one more than the value before it and one less than the value after it). No studies have investigated acquisition of the successor principle and exact ordering over time, and in relation to cardinal principle knowledge. An open question thus remains: Is the cardinal principle a "gatekeeper" concept children must acquire before learning about succession and exact ordering, or can these concepts develop separately? Preschoolers (N = 127) who knew the cardinal principle (CP-...
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2017
Children with early focal unilateral brain injury show remarkable plasticity in language developm... more Children with early focal unilateral brain injury show remarkable plasticity in language development. However, little is known about how early brain injury influences mathematical learning. Here, we examine early number understanding, comparing cardinal number knowledge of typically developing children (TD) and children with pre-and perinatal lesions (BI) between 42 and 50 months of age. We also examine how this knowledge relates to the number words children hear from their primary caregivers early in life. We find that children with BI, are, on average, slightly behind TD children in both cardinal number knowledge and later mathematical performance, and show slightly slower learning rates than TD children in cardinal number knowledge during the preschool years. We also find that parents' "number talk" to their toddlers predicts later mathematical ability for both TD children and children with BI. These findings suggest a relatively optimistic story in which neural plasticity is at play in children's mathematical development following early brain injury. Further, the effects of early number input suggest that intervening to enrich the number talk that children with BI hear during the preschool years could narrow the math achievement gap.
wesfiles.wesleyan.edu
... Acquiring First Number Words: The Developmental Trajectory of Children's Meanings for T... more ... Acquiring First Number Words: The Developmental Trajectory of Children's Meanings for Two Anna Shusterman, Dominic J. Gibson, Barry Finder Wesleyan ... that children do not understand the exact meaning of two until they are nearly three years old (eg, Wynn, 1992), and ...
Developmental Science, 2018
Journal of Cognition and Development, 2021
ABSTRACT Differences in children’s math knowledge emerge as early as the start of kindergarten, a... more ABSTRACT Differences in children’s math knowledge emerge as early as the start of kindergarten, and persist throughout schooling. Previous research implicates the importance of early parent number talk in the development of math competency. Yet we understand little about the factors that relate to variation in early parent number talk. The current study examined the relation of parent math anxiety and family socioeconomic status (SES) to parent number talk with children under the age of three (n = 36 dyads). For the first time, we show preliminary evidence that parent math anxiety (MA) predicts the amount of number talk children hear at home, beyond differences accounted for by SES. We also found a significant SES by parent MA interaction such that parent MA was predictive of higher-SES parents’ number talk but not that of lower-SES parents. Furthermore, we found that these relations were specific to parents’ cardinal number talk (but not counting), which has been shown to be particularly important in children’s math development.
Cognition, Jan 23, 2015
Before learning the cardinal principle (knowing that the last word reached when counting a set re... more Before learning the cardinal principle (knowing that the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of the whole set), children do not use number words accurately to label most set sizes. However, it remains unclear whether this difficulty reflects a general inability to conceptualize and communicate about number, or a specific problem with number words. We hypothesized that children's gestures might reflect knowledge of number concepts that they cannot yet express in speech, particularly for numbers they do not use accurately in speech (numbers above their knower-level). Number gestures are iconic in the sense that they are item-based (i.e., each finger maps onto one item in a set) and therefore may be easier to map onto sets of objects than number words, whose forms do not map transparently onto the number of items in a set and, in this sense, are arbitrary. In addition, learners in transition with respect to a concept often produce gestures that convey differen...
Child Development, 2014
Despite evidence that young children are sensitive to differences in angle measure, older student... more Despite evidence that young children are sensitive to differences in angle measure, older students frequently struggle to grasp this important mathematical concept. When making judgments about the size of angles, children often rely on erroneous dimensions such as the length of the angles' sides. The present study tested the possibility that this misconception stems from the whole-object word-learning bias by providing a subset of children with a separate label to refer to the whole angle figure. Thirty preschoolers (M = 4.86 years, SD = .53) were tested with a pretest-training-posttest design. At pretest, children showed evidence of the whole-object misconception. After training, children who were given a novel-word label for the whole object improved significantly more than those trained on the meaning of "angle" alone.
... of the Word "Two" by Dominic Gibson Class of 2010 A thesis submitted to the ... Tra... more ... of the Word "Two" by Dominic Gibson Class of 2010 A thesis submitted to the ... Traditional number language research suggests that children begin with the belief that two means a set greater than one (Wynn, 1990, 1992b). In contrast, conceptual research ...