LRDC Newsletter

The Pitt Kids' Thinking Lab

These days, it’s not uncommon to see parents bringing babies and preschoolers to the Center’s fifth floor. Room 550, decorated with colorful murals, houses the Pitt Kids’ Thinking Lab (KiT Lab). Directed by Melissa Libertus, the cheery atmosphere is the setting for tests that examine children’s emerging cognitive skills, particularly their early concepts of numbers and how those early concepts may contribute to later math skills. She leads a group of three graduate students (one who is visiting from Italy), 16 undergraduate students, a post doc, and a Hot Metal Bridge fellow, whose research interests center around the question of how children learn math and why some children struggle with it more than others. She is particularly interested in foundational number skills such as children’s ability to approximate numbers and how these skills help children acquire mathematical abilities.

Libertus joined Pitt as an assistant professor of psychology and LRDC research scientist in 2013 after completing degrees in psychology and neuroscience from Duke University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. She and members of her research team at Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Pitt, were among the first to confirm what many researchers had suspected: signs of mathematical ability are apparent as early as infancy. In a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers provided evidence that an infant’s preverbal “number sense” is linked to mathematical ability in preschool. Number sense is the instinctive ability to know which grouping or amount is higher without counting. The team measured six-month-old infants’ recognition of number sense using screens with varying numbers of dots. They tested the same children three years later and found that the infants who stared longer at the screens where the dots changed did better on tests of mathematical ability.  

In the KiT Lab, Libertus is building on those early findings to explore how the concept of number develops and how that shapes numerical skills. Her research spans an age range of three months to eight years. She also tests adults (parents and college students) to compare their abilities to those of children (especially their own children in the case of parents).  Libertus conducts behavioral and EEG studies with infants to learn how the concept of number develops, and with preschoolers, she conducts behavioral and eye-tracking studies focusing on how foundational number skills predict future math abilities.

Libertus’ current research hopes to identify the sources of individual differences and whether foundational number skills can be trained to improve math abilities, that is, whether early interventions can be developed to help children, even very young ones, improve their number sense.  With LRDC senior scientists Julie Fiez and Chris Schunn, Libertus is investigating how numerical systems are integrated with underlying representations of quantities. In this work, the researchers will develop behavioral and neuroscience methods to characterize math achievement in college students.

Her research has been published widely  and in 2014, she was selected to receive a Mind Brain and Education Society Early Career Award; the award is designed to recognize early career researchers who have made significant research contributions to the field of Mind, Brain, and Education.

Standing L-R: Dana Cohen, Joy Cui, Amy Veasey, Charles Yang, Eliana Munro, Serena Virgi, Carolyn Kotkiewicz, Permveer Longia

Seated L-R: Dominic Violi, Monica Navarro, Klaus Libertus, Melissa Libertus, Ruizhe Liu, Emily Braham