Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Vatansever, Gözde
• Üstün, Sertaç
• Ayyıldız, Nazife
• Çiçek, Metehan

Titel

Developmental alterations of the numerical processing networks in the brain

Ist Teil von

• Brain and cognition, 2020-06, Vol.141, p.105551-105551, Article 105551

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Fusiform/Number Form Area engagement increases with age for number perception.•Number processing engages parietal lobe for both children and adults.•Adults activate frontal cortex during number processing but not children.•Non-symbolic representation was more challenging in adulthood.•Insula activation is crucial for children and adults to overcome task difficulty. Neuroimaging studies revealed that number perception is mainly located in parietal cortex. Although controversial, it was suggested that number is processed in the frontal lobe in childhood and in the parietal cortex in adulthood. The purpose of this study is to investigate developmental differences in the neural correlates of number representation with fMRI. Sixteen healthy young adults (age:21.69 ± 0.79) and 15 healthy children (age:11.87 ± 0.52) performed a numerosity comparison paradigm which consists of two numerical conditions with two difficulty levels. Adults showed broad parietal cortex activation, as well as activation in the inferior parietal lobes, dorsolateral and medial prefrontal cortex, anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, and peristriate cortex (PC) during number processing. Children showed activations in the intraparietal sulcus and PC. Group differences were observed in the posterior insula, fusiform gyrus, and PC whose coordinates correspond to the number form area (NFA). Region of interest analysis was performed for these clusters to get the time series of hemodynamic responses which were estimated with a finite impulse response function. In contrast to the prominent frontoparietal shift theory, no age-related differences were observed in the frontoparietal regions. Overall, the presented study suggests developmental changes in the brain’s number processing revolving around the NFA.