Lyons I M, Vogel S E, Ansari D
Numerical Cognition Laboratory, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
Prog Brain Res. 2016;227:187-221. doi: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2016.04.010. Epub 2016 May 27.
The last several years have seen steady growth in research on the cognitive and neuronal mechanisms underlying how numbers are represented as part of ordered sequences. In the present review, we synthesize what is currently known about numerical ordinality from behavioral and neuroimaging research, point out major gaps in our current knowledge, and propose several hypotheses that may bear further investigation. Evidence suggests that how we process ordinality differs from how we process cardinality, but that this difference depends strongly on context-in particular, whether numbers are presented symbolically or nonsymbolically. Results also reveal many commonalities between numerical and nonnumerical ordinal processing; however, the degree to which numerical ordinality can be reduced to domain-general mechanisms remains unclear. One proposal is that numerical ordinality relies upon more general short-term memory mechanisms as well as more numerically specific long-term memory representations. It is also evident that numerical ordinality is highly multifaceted, with symbolic representations in particular allowing for a wide range of different types of ordinal relations, the complexity of which appears to increase over development. We examine the proposal that these relations may form the basis of a richer set of associations that may prove crucial to the emergence of more complex math abilities and concepts. In sum, ordinality appears to be an important and relatively understudied facet of numerical cognition that presents substantial opportunities for new and ground-breaking research.
在过去的几年里，关于数字作为有序序列一部分的认知和神经元机制的研究稳步增长。在本综述中，我们综合了行为和神经影像学研究中目前已知的关于数字顺序性的内容，指出了我们当前知识中的主要差距，并提出了几个可能值得进一步研究的假设。有证据表明，我们处理顺序性的方式与处理基数的方式不同，但这种差异很大程度上取决于上下文——特别是数字是以符号形式还是非符号形式呈现。结果还揭示了数字和非数字顺序处理之间的许多共性；然而，数字顺序性可以简化为领域通用机制的程度仍不清楚。一种观点认为，数字顺序性依赖于更一般的短期记忆机制以及更具数字特异性的长期记忆表征。同样明显的是，数字顺序性具有高度的多面性，特别是符号表征允许广泛的不同类型的顺序关系，其复杂性似乎随着发展而增加。我们探讨了这样一种观点，即这些关系可能构成一组更丰富关联的基础，而这组关联可能对更复杂的数学能力和概念的出现至关重要。总之，顺序性似乎是数字认知中一个重要但相对未被充分研究的方面，为新的和开创性的研究提供了大量机会。
