Advances in Cognitive Neuroscience of Numerical and Mathematical Processing

Book excerpt: In this special issue, the most recent advances in the domain of numerical cognition will be presented. During the last decades, our understanding of how numbers are processed increased dramatically with the arrival of different imaging techniques and neurophysiological experiments in humans and monkeys. We are now starting to build up a clearer picture of how numbers are represented in the brain, how this representation develops in the course of a lifetime, how numbers are embedded in other cognitive features like attention, spatial memory, etc., and how this eventually leads to our capability to perform complex mathematics. Ultimately, this accumulation of knowledge might provide us with an understanding of why numbers are problematic for some people. This special issue deals with all aspects of numerical cognition: findings on the basic neural responses to magnitudes, the link between numbers, space, time, attention, action, etc., mathematical processing, numerical development, in healthy and clinical populations. This special issue solicits contributions from the field of neurobiology, neuropsychology, and behavioral and computational neuroscience that will increase our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying numerical cognition