Neural Correlates of Symbolic and Non-Symbolic Arithmetic

Neuropsychologia 43 (2005) 744–753

10 Pages Posted: 14 May 2014

See all articles by Vinod Venkatraman

Vinod Venkatraman

Temple University - Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management

Daniel Ansari

Dartmouth College - Dept. of Education

Michael Chee

Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore

Date Written: December 13, 2003

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that areas in and around the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) represent magnitude in a stimulus-independent format. However, it has not been established whether the same is true for mental arithmetic or whether activation for higher level numerical processing diverges as a function of stimulus format. We addressed this question in a functional imaging study by presenting participants with simple addition problems using both symbolic (Arabic numerals) and non-symbolic (arrays of dots) stimuli. Conjunction analysis revealed common neural substrates for symbolic and non-symbolic addition in the anterior IPS bilaterally, left posterior IPS, medial frontal gyrus and left precentral gyrus. Right parietal and frontal cortex showed greater activation for non-symbolic addition. Our results demonstrate that mental arithmetic, studied using addition problems, is processed within the IPS independent of stimulus form. Additionally we examined whether exact and approximate addition conditions activated different neural substrates as a function of stimulus format.We did not find any differences between exact and approximate addition using symbolic and non-symbolic stimuli. This could be due to the inability of the participants to suppress exact calculation for single-digit addition problems. In contrast to recent findings, we found no significant activation for exact addition condition in left, language-related areas.

Keywords: Functional MRI, Numerical cognition, Addition, Intraparietal sulcus

Suggested Citation

Venkatraman, Vinod and Ansari, Daniel and Chee, Michael, Neural Correlates of Symbolic and Non-Symbolic Arithmetic (December 13, 2003). Neuropsychologia 43 (2005) 744–753, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2430737

Vinod Venkatraman

Temple University - Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management ( email )

Philadelphia, PA 19122
United States

Daniel Ansari

Dartmouth College - Dept. of Education ( email )

Department of Sociology
Hanover, NH 03755
United States

Michael Chee (Contact Author)

Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore ( email )

Singapore
Singapore

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