Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Early mathematics skills are an important predictor of lateracademic, economic and personal success. Children bornpreterm, about 10% of the US population, have an increasedrisk of deficits in mathematics. These deficits may be relatedto lower levels of executive functions and processing speed.We investigated the development of mathematics skills,working memory, inhibitory control and processing speed ofhealthy children born very preterm (between 25 and 32 weeksgestational age, n=51) and full-term (n=29). Children weretested annually from ages 5 to 7 years. We found persistentlower overall mathematics skills in the preterm group, drivenby differences in more informal skills (e.g. counting) at earliertime points, and by differences in more formal skills (e.g.calculation) at later time points. We did not find significantdifferences between preterm and full-term born children inspatial working memory capacity or processing speed.However, these cognitive measures were significantpredictors of mathematics skills in the preterm but not thefull-term group, hinting towards the use of different strategieswhen solving problems.