Inter-Parietal White Matter Development Predicts Numerical Performance in Young Children.
Abstract
In an effort to understand the role of interhemispheric transfer in numerical development,
we investigated the relationship between children's developing knowledge of numbers
and the integrity of their white matter connections between the cerebral hemispheres
(the corpus callosum). We used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography analyses
to test the link between the development of the corpus callosum and performance on
symbolic and non-symbolic numerical judgment tasks. We were especially interested
in the interhemispheric connections of parietal cortex in 6-year-old children, because
regions of parietal cortex have been implicated in the development of numerical skills
by several prior studies. Our results revealed significant structural differences
between children and adults in the fibers of the corpus callosum connecting the left
and right parietal lobes. Importantly, these structural differences were predictive
of individual differences among children in performance on numerical judgment tasks:
children with poor numerical performance relative to their peers exhibited reduced
white matter coherence in the fibers passing through the isthmus of the corpus callosum,
which connects the parietal hemispheres.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13479Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.lindif.2011.09.003Publication Info
Cantlon, Jessica F; Davis, Simon W; Libertus, Melissa E; Kahane, Jill; Brannon, Elizabeth
M; & Pelphrey, Kevin A (2011). Inter-Parietal White Matter Development Predicts Numerical Performance in Young Children.
Learn Individ Differ, 21(6). pp. 672-680. 10.1016/j.lindif.2011.09.003. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13479.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Elizabeth M. Brannon
Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Dr. Brannon's research program examines the evolution and development of quantitative
cognition. She studies how number, time, and spatial extent are represented by adult
humans, infants, young children and nonhuman animals without language. With her many
collaborators at Duke she applies behavioral techniques, event-related potentials,
functional magnetic resonance imaging, and single-unit physiology to explore the cognitive
and neural underpinnings of numerical cognition in nonhuman primates
This author no longer has a Scholars@Duke profile, so the information shown here reflects
their Duke status at the time this item was deposited.
Simon Wilton Davis
Assistant Professor in Neurology
My research centers around the use of structural and functional imaging measures to
study the shifts in network architecture in the aging brain. I am specifically interested
in changes in how changes in structural and functional connectivity associated with
aging impact the semantic retrieval of word or fact knowledge. Currently this involves
asking why older adults have particular difficulty in certain kinds of semantic retrieval,
despite the fact that vocabularies and knowledge stores typic
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