Educational Neuroscience, Institute of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium; Research Center in the Psychology of Cognition, Language, and Emotion (PsyCLE), Aix-Marseille University, France.
Neuropsychologia. 2021 Jul 16;157:107849. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107849. Epub 2021 Apr 19.
Single-digit multiplications are thought to be associated with different levels of interference because they show different degrees of feature overlap (i.e., digits) with previously learnt problems. Recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies provided evidence for this interference effect and showed that individual differences in arithmetic fact retrieval are related to differences in sensitivity to interference (STI). The present study investigated whether and to what extent competence-related differences in STI and its neurophysiological correlates can be modulated by a multiplication facts training. Participants were 23 adults with high and 23 adults with low arithmetic competencies who underwent a five-day multiplication facts training in which they intensively practiced sets of low- and high-interfering multiplication problems. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test session after the training, participants worked on a multiplication verification task that comprised trained and untrained problems. Analyses of the behavioral data revealed an interference effect only in the low competence group, which could be reduced but not resolved by training. On the neural level, competence-related differences in the interference effect were observed in the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG), showing activation differences between low- and high-interfering problems only in the low competent group. These findings support the idea that individuals' low arithmetic skills are related to the development of insufficient memory representations because of STI. Further, our results indicate that a short training by drill (i.e., learning associations between operands and solutions) was not fully effective to resolve existing interference effects in arithmetic fact knowledge.
个位数乘法被认为与不同程度的干扰有关，因为它们与之前学习过的问题在特征上（即数字）有不同程度的重叠。最近的行为和神经影像学研究为这种干扰效应提供了证据，并表明算术事实检索中的个体差异与对干扰的敏感性（STI）的差异有关。本研究探讨了在乘法事实训练中，STI 及其神经生理相关性的与能力相关的差异是否以及在何种程度上可以得到调节。参与者包括 23 名具有高算术能力的成年人和 23 名具有低算术能力的成年人，他们参加了为期五天的乘法事实训练，在训练中他们密集地练习了低干扰和高干扰的乘法问题。在训练后的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测试中，参与者完成了一个乘法验证任务，其中包括训练过的和未训练过的问题。对行为数据的分析仅在低能力组中发现了干扰效应，该效应可以通过训练得到减少但不能完全消除。在神经水平上，在左缘上回（SMG）中观察到与能力相关的干扰效应差异，仅在低能力组中观察到低干扰和高干扰问题之间的激活差异。这些发现支持了这样的观点，即个体的低算术技能与 STI 导致的记忆表示不足的发展有关。此外，我们的结果表明，通过练习（即学习操作数和解决方案之间的关联）进行的短期训练对于解决算术事实知识中现有的干扰效应并不完全有效。
