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Facts and Figures: Neuro-functional foundations and cognitive processes of numerical magnitude processing and arithmetic fact retrieval

Subject Area Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Term from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 400857833
 
Final Report Year 2023

Final Report Abstract

What can we learn from brain damage about numerical processes in the healthy brain? This was one of the central questions of this project. Two basic processes are distinguished in number processing: numerical magnitude processing and arithmetic fact retrieval. The distinction between these processes and their neurocognitive correlates is still controversial. In parallelized studies, we investigated the neurocognitive correlates of both processes in stroke patients and healthy controls. The parallelized experimental design enabled us to ask and answer similar questions regarding the characteristics of magnitude processing and fact retrieval in stroke patients and healthy controls. The application of recently developed disconnectome mapping to stroke lesions allowed us to identify causal relationships between fact retrieval and its neuro-functional and neuro-structural correlates for the first time in numerical cognition. Furthermore, spatial-numerical associations (e.g., in neglect patients) were studied as a pathological model for unimpaired magnitude processing such as proportions. In parallel, using visual hemifield stimulation, we investigated causal assumptions regarding fact retrieval and numerical magnitude in healthy control participants, in whom the influence of pathological interferences is excluded. Similarly, we induced transient neglect in healthy participants by using vestibular stimulation to investigate spatial-numerical associations while ruling out the influence of pathological interference. Our results led, among others, to the formulation of the Two-Network Framework (TNF) of numerical cognition. Based on the TNF, we developed a classification schema of phenomenological subtypes and their underlying neural origin. Our project advances our understanding of (un)impaired number processing and enables implications for the diagnosis and treatment of acalculia and dyscalculia.

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