Brain Scans Show Girls And Boys Equal At Math

By Katie Hunt, CNN (CNN) — Several studies have already debunked the myth that boys are innately better at math than girls, but those are largely based on analysis of test scores. Now, researchers also have brain imaging that proves young children use the same mechanisms and networks in the brain to solve math problems no matter their gender. The study was published Friday in the journal Science of Learning. “We’d studied the behavior of young girls and boys on mathematics tests, and we’d observed that their performance was statistically equivalent; they were indistinguishable. They’d developed the same abilities at the same rates in early childhood,” says Jessica Cantlon, a professor of developmental neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University and the study’s senior author. “But there was this lingering question of what’s going on under the hood? Is it the same neural mechanism that allows them to accomplish this equivalent behavior?” To answer this question, Cantlon and her team got 104 kids between the ages of 3 and 10 to perform cognitive tests and watch videos of engaging math lessons while in an MRI scanner. It’s the first study to use neuroimaging to evaluate biological gender differences in the math aptitude of young children. “We looked at which areas of the brain respond more strongly to mathematics content in the videos and tasks, compared to non-math content like reading or the alphabet. So ...
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