SynthesisDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2018
Brain areas associated with numbers and calculations in children: Meta-analyses of fMRI studies.
Synthesis in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 121 papers, 10 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
121 citing papers in PubMed, 10 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Aging-related changes in cognitive flexibility: fMRI meta-analysis.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2025Pooled it
- Neurodevelopmental commonalities in cognitive control networks for mathematics and reading in meta-analysis of 3308 participants.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Brain-wide decoding of numbers and letters: Converging evidence from multivariate fMRI analysis and probabilistic meta-analysis.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- Mapping common and distinct brain correlates among cognitive flexibility tasks: concordant evidence from meta-analyses.Brain imaging and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- Mathematics Skills in Epilepsy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Neuropsychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Dysfunctions associated with the intraparietal sulcus and a distributed network in individuals with math learning difficulties: An ALE meta-analysis.Human brain mapping · 2023Pooled it
- Spatial migration of human reward processing with functional development: Evidence from quantitative meta-analyses.Human brain mapping · 2020Pooled it
- Cognitive Brain Signatures of Youth With Early Onset and Relatives With Schizophrenia: Evidence From fMRI Meta-analyses.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2020Pooled it
- Dissociations of cognitive inhibition, response inhibition, and emotional interference: Voxelwise ALE meta-analyses of fMRI studies.Human brain mapping · 2018Pooled it
- Brain responses to social norms: Meta-analyses of fMRI studies.Human brain mapping · 2018Pooled it
- Maternal FADS2 single nucleotide polymorphism modified the impact of prenatal docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) supplementation on child neurodevelopment at 5 years: Follow-up of a randomized clinical trial.Clinical nutrition (Edinburgh, Scotland) · 2021Trial
- Uncovering Latent Cognitive, Metacognitive, and Neural Bases of Problem-Solving Deficits in Children with Developmental Dyscalculia.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Mathematics Anxiety Is Associated With Attentional and Memory-Related Neural Activity During Numerical Cognition.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Experience-dependent cortical plasticity in response to formal schooling: Effects on networks for reading and mathematics.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Serum Molecular Fingerprints of Oxidative Stress Underlying Neurocognitive and Motor Dysfunction in Pesticide-Exposed Populations.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Functional network activation during a subtraction task.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Number words recruit numerosity-related cortex in 3- to 5-year-old children.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Effects of Dance-Based Exergaming on Mental Rotation, General Motor Coordination, and Math Achievement in Adolescent Students: Nonrandomized Controlled Pilot Study.JMIR serious games · 2026Article
- Latent Neurocognitive Mechanisms Underlying Quantity Discrimination in Children with and without Mathematical Learning Disabilities.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neurocognitive mechanisms of mathematics vocabulary processing in L1 and L2 in South African first graders: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.Neurophotonics · 2026Article
61 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issuedErratum.2020
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Children use numbers every day and typically receive formal mathematical training from an early age, as it is a main subject in school curricula. Despite an increase in children neuroimaging studies, a comprehensive neuropsychological model of mathematical functions in children is lacking. Using quantitative meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, we identify concordant brain areas across articles that adhere to a set of selection criteria (e.g., whole-brain analysis, coordinate reports) and report brain activity to tasks that involve processing symbolic and non-symbolic numbers with and without formal mathematical operations, which we called respectively number tasks and calculation tasks. We present data on children 14 years and younger, who solved these tasks. Results show activity in parietal (e.g., inferior parietal lobule and precuneus) and frontal (e.g., superior and medial frontal gyri) cortices, core areas related to mental-arithmetic, as well as brain regions such as the insula and claustrum, which are not typically discussed as part of mathematical problem solving models. We propose a topographical atlas of mathematical processes in children, discuss findings within a developmental constructivist theoretical model, and suggest practical methodological considerations for future studies.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.