ArticleCerebral cortex communications2021
Symbols Are Special: An fMRI Adaptation Study of Symbolic, Nonsymbolic, and Non-Numerical Magnitude Processing in the Human Brain.
Article in Cerebral cortex communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Rational numbers: A systematic review and ALE meta-analysis of the neuroimaging of fraction and decimal processing in the brain.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- The role of the intraparietal sulcus in numeracy: A review of parietal lesion cases.Behavioural brain research · 2025Pooled it
- The neural correlates of retrieval and procedural strategies in mental arithmetic: A functional neuroimaging meta-analysis.Human brain mapping · 2023Pooled it
- Temporal order of activations and interactions during arithmetic calculations measured by intracranial electrophysiological recordings in the human brain.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Lesion-symptom mapping reveals differential relationships between language and precise versus approximate numeracy.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2025Article
- Distinct neural representational changes following cross-format number tutoring in children with mathematical difficulties.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Short-term number sense training recapitulates long-term neurodevelopmental changes from childhood to adolescence.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Identifying conceptual neural responses to symbolic numerals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Cortical representations of numbers and nonsymbolic quantities expand and segregate in children from 5 to 8 years of age.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Recognition ability of untrained neural networks to symbolic numbers.Frontiers in neuroinformatics · 2022Article
- Shared Numerosity Representations Across Formats and Tasks Revealed with 7 Tesla fMRI: Decoding, Generalization, and Individual Differences in Behavior.Cerebral cortex communications · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
How are different formats of magnitudes represented in the human brain? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation to isolate representations of symbols, quantities, and physical size in 45 adults. Results indicate that the neural correlates supporting the passive processing of number symbols are largely dissociable from those supporting quantities and physical size, anatomically and representationally. Anatomically, passive processing of quantities and size correlate with activation in the right intraparietal sulcus, whereas symbolic number processing, compared with quantity processing, correlates with activation in the left inferior parietal lobule. Representationally, neural patterns of activation supporting symbols are dissimilar from neural activation patterns supporting quantity and size in the bilateral parietal lobes. These findings challenge the longstanding notion that the culturally acquired ability to conceptualize symbolic numbers is represented using entirely the same brain systems that support the evolutionarily ancient system used to process quantities. Moreover, these data reveal that regions that support numerical magnitude processing are also important for the processing of non-numerical magnitudes. This discovery compels future investigations of the neural consequences of acquiring knowledge of symbolic numbers.
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