PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Exploring Neural Correlates for Levels of Cognitive Load During Justifying Tasks
Page: 1652
A recent special issue of ZDM (June 2016) made the case for increasing the interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in the fields of mathematics education and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, Ansari and Lyons (2016) argued for increasing the “ecological validity of the testing situations and specific [neurocognitive] tests used to measure mathematical processing” (pp. 379-380). The study reported on in this poster serves as a “proof-of-concept” for the use of Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure the level of cognitive load of the brain under mathematical justifying. The poster will address the pros and cons of using neurocognitive measures, such as the fNIRS, to measure and examine the physiological stresses of the brain under the complex mathematical process of proving.