Journal
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
Volume 36, Issue 2, Pages 804-826Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/hbm.22666
Keywords
child development; adolescent development; academic achievement; mathematics; functional magnetic resonance imaging; cognition; behavior; number sense; numerosity
Funding
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [R24 HD075489]
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A central question in cognitive and educational neuroscience is whether brain operations supporting nonlinguistic intuitive number sense (numerosity) predict individual acquisition and academic achievement for symbolic or formal math knowledge. Here, we conducted a developmental functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of nonsymbolic numerosity task performance in 44 participants including 14 school age children (6-12 years old), 14 adolescents (13-17 years old), and 16 adults and compared a brain activity measure of numerosity precision to scores from the Woodcock-Johnson III Broad Math index of math academic achievement. Accuracy and reaction time from the numerosity task did not reliably predict formal math achievement. We found a significant positive developmental trend for improved numerosity precision in the parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus specifically. Controlling for age and overall cognitive ability, we found a reliable positive relationship between individual math achievement scores and parietal lobe activity only in children. In addition, children showed robust positive relationships between math achievement and numerosity precision within ventral stream processing areas bilaterally. The pattern of results suggests a dynamic developmental trajectory for visual discrimination strategies that predict the acquisition of formal math knowledge. In adults, the efficiency of visual discrimination marked by numerosity acuity in ventral occipital-temporal cortex and hippocampus differentiated individuals with better or worse formal math achievement, respectively. Overall, these results suggest that two different brain systems for nonsymbolic numerosity acuity may contribute to individual differences in math achievement and that the contribution of these systems differs across development. Hum Brain Mapp 36:804-826, 2015. (c) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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