Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Cereb Cortex. 2010 Sep;20(9):2166-71. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhp273. Epub 2010 Jan 5.
Based on neuroimaging methods, it is a commonly held view that numerical representation in the human parietal lobes is format independent. We used a transcranial magnetic stimulation adaptation paradigm to examine the existence of functionally segregated overlapping populations of neurons for different numerical formats and to reveal how numerical information is encoded and represented. Based on 2 experiments, we found that right parietal lobe stimulation showed a dissociation between digits and verbal numbers, whereas the left parietal lobe showed a double dissociation between the different numerical formats. Further analysis and modeling also excluded pre- or postrepresentational components as the source of the current effects. These results demonstrate that both parietal lobes are equipped with format-dependent neurons that encode quantity.
基于神经影像学方法，人们普遍认为，人类顶叶中的数值表示是格式独立的。我们使用经颅磁刺激适应范式来检验不同数值格式的神经元是否存在功能上分离的重叠群体，并揭示数字信息是如何被编码和表示的。基于 2 项实验，我们发现右顶叶刺激在数字和口头数字之间表现出分离，而左顶叶在不同数值格式之间表现出双重分离。进一步的分析和建模也排除了预或后表示成分作为当前效应的来源。这些结果表明，两个顶叶都配备了格式相关的神经元，这些神经元对数量进行编码。
