Brain mechanisms of mathematical development: A longitudinal fMRI study from preschool to second grade
Morfoisse, T.; Becuwe, S.; Palu, M.; Potier-Watkins, C.; Dehaene-Lambertz, G.; Dehaene, S.
Show abstract
How does the developing brain, initially equipped only with elementary mathematical intuitions, acquire higher mathematical concepts? Through a longitudinal functional MRI study of children from preschool through first and second grade, we tracked how neural responses to mathematical and non-mathematical statements change in the first two years of formal schooling and use the data to evaluate several theories of developmental change. Before school, when listening to math statements, children already engage an adult-like cortical network, with partial specialization for geometry. Over the first two years of school, we observe an overall increase in math-related activation, a small recruitment of additional neural territory, reduced activation for facts that get better known, and a small overall increase in the dimensionality of representational space. fMRI responses to individual sentences suggest that these mechanisms, particularly in left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral intraparietal sulcus, all contribute to childrens growing mastery of mathematical concepts.
Matching journals
The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Longitudinal development of category representations in ventral temporal cortex predicts word and face recognition 97%
- Dynamically shifting from compositional to conjunctive brain representations supports cognitive task learning 96%
- Think Like an Expert: Neural Alignment Predicts Understanding in Students Taking an Introduction to Computer Science Course 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- Longitudinal associations between language network characteristics in the infant brain and school-age reading abilities are mediated by early-developing phonological skills 96%
- High-field fMRI at 7 Tesla reveals topographic responses tuned to number in the developing human brain 95%
- A Subset of Cortical Areas Exhibit Adult-like Functional Network Patterns in Early Childhood 94%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.