Ed is in San Francisco for the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association where he is chairing a session titled Contributions of Basic Cognitive Processes to School-Based Mathematics Learning: Uncovering the Neural Pathways. The program includes Justin Halberda (Johns Hopkins), Ed, Miriam Rosenberg-Lee and Kristen Pilner Blair (both Stanford), and builds from an understanding of the approximate number system (ANS), to how symbols link with the ANS, and then on to understanding the role of working memory in math, and how children might use an understanding of symmetry to better understand negative numbers.