Lecture 6 - Typical Math

Question 1

cardinality

Answer 1

quantity/magnitude information

Question 2

ordinality

Answer 2

position of something/someone in a sequence

Question 3

nominality

Answer 3

code or label for something

Question 4

number skills shared with other species

Answer 4

• Cultural diverse capacity building on an innate neuronal system shared with other species
  ○ John Locke, 1690
  
  • Numbers are a natural category that many animals can exploit
    ○ Protection against predators
    ○ Nutrition (exploit or explore)
    ○ Fight or flight
  • Requires at least approximate processing of numerosity

Question 5

how do animals estimate numerosity?

Answer 5

• Neurons specifically tuned to certain numerosities
  ○ activation maximal for preferred numerosity
  ○ decreases as numerical distance to preferred numerosity increases
  
  • Tuning is abstract (specific pattern or density or cumulated area does not explain data)
  • Tuning emerges spontaneously (even when monkeys trained on colour discrimination)
  • Tuning curves get broader as numerosity increases
  • Numerosity-neurons in prefrontal and parietal cortex

Question 6

triple code model

Answer 6

auditive-verbal
visual arabic
analogue magnitude

Question 7

Patient WT white matter lesion study

Answer 7

• Severe calculation deficit!
  * Cortex areas for multiplication
  Spared
  □ White matter matters!
  □ Allowing for causal interpretation
  with fMRI data
  □ Training studies needed!
  Klein et al. (2013)

Question 8

multiplication training successful

Answer 8

• Trained items after training faster and less error prone than untrained items
  
  • After training more activation in left angular gyrus for trained (A) and fronto-parietal magnitude network (including IPS) for untrained items (B)
  • After training more activation in left temporal language areas as well as the hippocampus than before the training (Bloechle et al., 2016)
  • After training higher neural connectivity of hippocampus with other brain areas than before the training (Klein et al., 2019)

Question 9

training arithmetic fact knowledge leads to

Answer 9

○ stronger activation in areas associated with long term memory
○ higher connectivity of these areas