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Abstract 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.
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Protracted Neural Development of Dorsal Motor Systems During Handwriting and the Relation to Early Literacy Skills
Handwriting is a complex visual-motor skill that affects early reading development. A large body of work has demonstrated that handwriting is supported by a widespread neural system comprising ventral-temporal, parietal, and frontal motor regions in adults. Recent work has demonstrated that this neural system is largely established by 8 years of age, suggesting that the development of this system occurs in young children who are still learning to read and write. We made use of a novel MRI-compatible writing tablet that allowed us to measure brain activation in 5–8-year-old children during handwriting. We compared activation during handwriting in children and adults to provide information concerning the developmental trajectory of the neural system that supports handwriting. We found that parietal and frontal motor involvement during handwriting in children is different from adults, suggesting that the neural system that supports handwriting changes over the course of development. Furthermore, we found that parietal and frontal motor activation correlated with a literacy composite score in our child sample, suggesting that the individual differences in the dorsal response during handwriting are related to individual differences in emerging literacy skills. Our results suggest that components of the widespread neural system supporting handwriting develop at different rates and provide insight into the mechanisms underlying the contributions of handwriting to early literacy development.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2004877
- PAR ID:
- 10377375
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Volume:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 1664-1078
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750559
