Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Research Center for Mind, Brain and Learning, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2019 Apr 15;40(6):1927-1941. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24502. Epub 2018 Dec 18.
Mathematical word problems are ubiquitous and standard for teaching and evaluating generalization of mathematical knowledge for real-world contexts. It is therefore concerning that the neural mechanisms of word problem solving are not well understood, as these insights represent strong potential for improving education and remediating deficits in this domain. Here, we investigate neural response to word problems via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Healthy adults performed sentence judgment tasks on word problems that either contained one-step mathematical operations, or nonarithmetic judgments on parallel narratives without any numerical information. Behavioral results suggested that the composite efficiency measurement of combining accuracy and RT did not differ between the two problem types. Arithmetic sentence judgments elicited greater activation in the fronto-insular-parietal network including intraparietal sulcus (IPS), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), and anterior insula (AI) than narrative sentence judgment. Narrative sentence judgments, conversely, resulted in greater activation predominantly in the left ventral PFC, angular gyrus and perisylvian cortex compared with reading arithmetic sentences. Moreover, task-dependent functional connectivity analyses showed the AI circuits were more strongly coupled with IPS during arithmetic sentence judgments than nonarithmetic sentences. Finally, activations in the IPS during arithmetic were highly correlated with out-of-scanner performance on a distinct set of problems with the same characteristics. These results show arithmetic word problem performance differences may rely more heavily on fronto-insular-parietal circuits for mathematical model building than narrative text comprehension of similar difficulty. More broadly, our study suggests that quantitative measurements of brain mechanisms can provide pivotal role for uncovering crucial arithmetic skills.
数学文字问题无处不在，是教授和评估数学知识在现实情境中推广的标准方法。因此，令人担忧的是，文字问题解决的神经机制尚未得到很好的理解，因为这些见解代表了在这一领域改善教育和弥补缺陷的巨大潜力。在这里，我们通过功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究文字问题的神经反应。健康成年人在文字问题上执行句子判断任务，这些问题要么包含一步数学运算，要么在没有任何数字信息的平行叙述中进行非算术判断。行为结果表明，两种问题类型的准确性和 RT 的综合效率测量没有差异。算术句子判断比叙事句子判断在额-岛-顶叶网络（包括顶内沟（IPS）、背外侧前额叶皮层（PFC）和前岛叶（AI））中引起更大的激活。相反，叙事句子判断导致左腹侧 PFC、角回和周围大脑皮层的激活增加，与阅读算术句子相比。此外，任务相关的功能连接分析表明，在算术句子判断中，AI 回路与 IPS 的耦合比非算术句子更强。最后，在 IPS 中的激活与在具有相同特征的一组不同问题上的扫描外表现高度相关。这些结果表明，算术文字问题表现的差异可能更依赖于额-岛-顶叶电路进行数学模型构建，而不是对类似难度的叙事文本的理解。更广泛地说，我们的研究表明，对大脑机制的定量测量可以为揭示关键的算术技能提供关键作用。
