ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The impact of a lack of mathematical education on brain development and future attainment.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Boosting executive functions and math abilities in adolescents with dyscalculia: the combined effect of prismatic adaptation and cognitive training.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Trial
- Glutamatergic signaling underlies brain structural organization for mathematical and reading abilities in children.Nature communications · 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
- Functional connectivity and GABAergic signaling modulate the enhancement effect of neurostimulation on mathematical learning.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Personalized deep neural networks reveal mechanisms of math learning disabilities in children.Science advances · 2025Article
- The early advantage: How antenatal care shapes cognitive development in India: Evidence from Young Lives, India.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Differences in educational opportunity predict white matter development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Digital twins for understanding mechanisms of learning disabilities: Personalized deep neural networks reveal impact of neuronal hyperexcitability.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Physical activity promotes the development of cognitive ability in adolescents: the chain mediating role based on self-education expectations and learning behaviors.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Human neuronal excitation/inhibition balance explains and predicts neurostimulation induced learning benefits.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- The Relationship Between Level of Education, Cognitive Function and Medication Adherence in Patients with Schizophrenia.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2023Article
- NIfTI-MRS: A standard data format for magnetic resonance spectroscopy.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2022Article
- The effect of parietal glutamate/GABA balance on test anxiety levels in early childhood in a cross-sectional and longitudinal study.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Identifying Non-Math Students from Brain MRIs with an Ensemble Classifier Based on Subspace-Enhanced Contrastive Learning.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Predicting learning and achievement using GABA and glutamate concentrations in human development.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- An MRI Study on Effects of Math Education on Brain Development Using Multi-Instance Contrastive Learning.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
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3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Formal education has a long-term impact on an individual's life. However, our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education, such as in mathematics, is currently poor but is highly relevant given the extant differences between countries in their educational curricula and the differences in opportunities to access education. Here we examined whether neurotransmitter concentrations in the adolescent brain could classify whether a student is lacking mathematical education. Decreased γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) concentration within the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) successfully classified whether an adolescent studies math and was negatively associated with frontoparietal connectivity. In a second experiment, we uncovered that our findings were not due to preexisting differences before a mathematical education ceased. Furthermore, we showed that MFG GABA not only classifies whether an adolescent is studying math or not, but it also predicts the changes in mathematical reasoning ∼19 mo later. The present results extend previous work in animals that has emphasized the role of GABA neurotransmission in synaptic and network plasticity and highlight the effect of a specific lack of education on MFG GABA concentration and learning-dependent plasticity. Our findings reveal the reciprocal effect between brain development and education and demonstrate the negative consequences of a specific lack of education during adolescence on brain plasticity and cognitive functions.
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