Aulet Lauren S, Kaicher Caroline M, Cantlon Jessica F
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States.
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 420, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, United States.
Cereb Cortex. 2025 Jun 4;35(6). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhaf126.
Early mathematical development is thought to depend on visuospatial processing, yet neural evidence for this relationship in young children has been limited. We examined the neural mechanisms supporting numerical and visuospatial processing in 4- to 8-year-old children and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), with three tasks: numerical matching, geometric shape matching, and number line estimation. We found that specialization for numerical and geometric processing in parietal cortex exists by 4-8 years of age, and that children exhibited greater conjunctive activation between numerical and geometric tasks throughout the parietal cortex compared to adults. During the number line task, children's neural activity significantly overlapped with activity from both number and geometric shape matching tasks, whereas adults' activity only overlapped with the number task. These findings provide the first neural evidence that number line estimation relies on both numerical and geometric processing in children, whereas it depends primarily on number-specific processing in adults.
早期数学发展被认为依赖于视觉空间处理，但关于幼儿这种关系的神经学证据一直有限。我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI），通过三个任务：数字匹配、几何形状匹配和数字线估计，研究了4至8岁儿童和成年人中支持数字和视觉空间处理的神经机制。我们发现，顶叶皮层中数字和几何处理的特化在4至8岁时就已存在，并且与成年人相比，儿童在整个顶叶皮层的数字和几何任务之间表现出更大的联合激活。在数字线任务中，儿童的神经活动与数字和几何形状匹配任务的活动显著重叠，而成年人的活动仅与数字任务重叠。这些发现提供了首个神经学证据，表明数字线估计在儿童中依赖于数字和几何处理，而在成年人中主要依赖于数字特定处理。
