Form Perception Deficit in Chinese Children with Developmental Dyscalculia

Children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) lag behind substantially on arithmetic abilities, given their chronological age, intelligence, and age-appropriate education. Individuals with DD have difficulties in the production and comprehension of numbers. Cognitive neuroscience studies have demonstrated that DD is characterized by deficits in numerosity processing or approximate number representation. One viewpoint suggests that the generalized magnitude system is the underlying mechanism. In this chapter, we introduce a method to define developmental dyscalculia in the Chinese context and propose an alternative explanation for it emergence that capitalizes on low-level visual perceptual processing - shared mechanism between numerosity processing and mathematical performance. We then examine whether a visual perception deficit existed in DD and its universality in specific learning disorders. Finally, interventional research further explores the effect of numerosity training on children with DD and the cognitive mechanism underlying the training effect. These findings prove that form perception is a critical cognitive mechanism in nonsymbolic numerosity and symbolic arithmetic in children with DD.