Functional investigation of the networks and white matter substrates associated with the processing of mathematical operations

I.S. Matiulko; S.P. Kulikova; K.V. Konopkina; M. Arsalidou

doi:10.17323/978-5-7598-2039-0

Publications

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Functional investigation of the networks and white matter substrates associated with the processing of mathematical operations

P. 280–280.

I.S. Matiulko, S.P. Kulikova, K.V. Konopkina, M. Arsalidou

Processing of mathematical operations and solving numerical tasks implicate a distributed set of brain regions. These regions include the superior and inferior parietal lobules that underlie numerical processing such as size judgments, and additional prefrontal regions that are needed for formal mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction and multiplication [Arsalidou, Taylor, 2011]. Critically, little is known about the connectivity between these regions and the association between math performance and the anatomical structure of white matter tracts. The present study investigates connectivity and white matter tracks associated with networks related to math performance: arcuate fasciculus (AF) and superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). Participants performed a computerized task with mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) with three levels of difficulty; accuracy and reaction time were recorded. Diffusion tensor imagining (DTI) recordings provided indices on fractional anisotropy (FA) — a measure of the direction of white matter tracks in the brain. The relation between FA and math performance scores is reported.

Keywords: Diffusion tensor Imaging (DTI)диффузионная тензорная МРТ mathematical operations

Publication based on the results of:

Neurocognitive foundations of mathematical cognition in children (2019)

In book

Proceedings of the PME and Yandex Russian conference: Technology and Psychology for Mathematics Education

M.: SU HSE Publishing House, 2019.

Math skills and microstructure of the middle longitudinal fasciculus: A developmental investigation

Buyanova I., Istomina A., Manzhurtsev A. et al., Plos One 2025 No. 20(6) Article e0324802

Functional neuroimaging studies have identified distributed brain networks involved in arithmetic problem-solving. However, it is still poorly understood to what extent microstructural properties of the underlying white matter contribute to mathematical performance. We investigate microstructural characteristics of one of the least studied white matter tracts, the bilateral middle longitudinal fasciculus (MdLF), reconstructed from diffusion-weighted MRI ...

Added: June 16, 2025

Cerebral White Matter Myelination and Relations to Age, Gender, and Cognition: A Selective Review

Buyanova I., Arsalidou M., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2021 Vol. 15 Article 662031

White matter makes up about fifty percent of the human brain. Maturation of white matter accompanies biological development and undergoes the most dramatic changes during childhood and adolescence. Despite the advances in neuroimaging techniques, controversy concerning spatial, and temporal patterns of myelination, as well as the degree to which the microstructural characteristics of white matter ...

Added: September 10, 2021

Attentional strategies during mental arithmetic

Bachurina V., Arsalidou M., Journal of Vision 2021 Vol. 21 No. 9 Article 2539

Eye-tracking is widely used in research of attentional strategies in tasks with visual representations. Strategies improve with learning and many have examined differences in attention allocation between experts and novices. Research show that when math problems are presented on the screen with response options, novices fixated more on response options that included distractors, whereas experts ...

Added: September 10, 2021

Left frontal aslant tract and lexical selection: Evidence from frontal lobe lesions

Zyryanov A., Malyutina S., Dragoy O., Neuropsychologia 2020 Vol. 147 P. 1–12

The frontal aslant tract (FAT) is a white-matter tract connecting the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the supplementary motor complex (SMC). Damage to either component of the network causes spontaneous speech dysfluency, indicating its critical role in language production. However, spontaneous speech dysfluency may stem from various lower-level linguistic deficits, precluding inferences about the nature ...

Added: June 18, 2020

Microstructural anatomical differences between bilinguals and monolinguals

Singh N., Rajan A., Malagi A. et al., 2018 Vol. 21 No. 5 P. 995–1008

DTI is an established method to study cerebral white-matter microstructure. Two established measures of DTI are fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) and both differ for bilingual and monolingual speakers. Less is known about differences in two other measures called radial (RD) and axial diffusivity (AD). We report differences in mean RD and AD-values ...

Added: October 23, 2019

Понимание синтаксически сложных предложений: связь правильности и скорости с характеристиками проводящих путей головного мозга

Malyutina S., Погосбекян Э. Л., Баталов А. И. et al., В кн.: Когнитивная наука в Москве: новые исследования. Материалы конференции 15 июня 2017 г.: Буки Веди, 2017. С. 231–236.

Age-related changes in language processing have not yet been as well-studied as those in perception, memory, attention or cognition. Specifically with regard to syntactic processing, it is still debatable whether only the processing speed or also accuracy decreases with age. The present study investigated the effect of age and individual differences on syntactic processing in ...

Added: September 28, 2017

Boosting connectome classification via combination of geometric and topological normalizations

Petrov D., Dodonova Y., Zhukov L. E. et al., , in: PRNI 2016. The 6th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging. Trento, Italy, June 22nd – 24th, 2016.: NY: IEEE, 2016. P. 1–4.

The structural connectome classification is a challenging task due to a small sample size and high dimensionality of feature space. In this paper, we propose a new data prepossessing method that combines geometric and topological connectome normalization and significantly improves classification results. We validate this approach by performing classification between autism spectrum disorder and normal ...

Added: March 5, 2017

Correction Strategy for Diffusion-Weighted Images Corrupted with Motion: Application to the DTI Evaluation of Infants White Matter

Dubois J., Kulikova S., Hertz-Pannier L. et al., Magnetic Resonance Imaging 2014 Vol. 32 No. 8 P. 981–992

Objective Diffusion imaging techniques such as DTI and HARDI are difficult to implement in infants because of their sensitivity to subject motion. A short acquisition time is generally preferred, at the expense of spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. Before estimating the local diffusion model, most pre-processing techniques only register diffusion-weighted volumes, without correcting for intra-slice artifacts ...

Added: October 22, 2015

The Early Development of Brain White Matter: A Review of Imaging Studies in Fetuses, Newborns and Infants.

Dubois J., Dehaene-Lambertz G., Kulikova S. et al., Neuroscience 2015 Vol. 276 P. 48–71

Studying how the healthy human brain develops is important to understand early pathological mechanisms and to assess the influence of fetal or perinatal events on later life. Brain development relies on complex and intermingled mechanisms especially during gestation and first post-natal months, with intense interactions between genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors. Although the baby's brain ...

Added: October 22, 2015

Exploring the early organization and maturation of linguistic pathways in the human infant brain

Dubois J., Poupon C., Thirion B. et al., Cerebral Cortex 2015 Vol. 26 No. 5 P. 2283–2298

Linguistic processing is based on a close collaboration between temporal and frontal regions connected by two pathways: the “dorsal” and “ventral pathways” (assumed to support phonological and semantic processing, respectively, in adults). We investigated here the development of these pathways at the onset of language acquisition, during the first post-natal weeks, using cross-sectional diffusion imaging ...

Added: October 22, 2015

Multi-parametric evaluation of the white matter maturation

Kulikova S., Hertz-Pannier L., Dehaene-Lambertz G. et al., Brain Structure and Function 2015 Vol. 220 No. 6 P. 3657–3672

In vivo evaluation of the brain white matter maturation is still a challenging task with no existing gold standards. In this article we propose an original approach to evaluate the early maturation of the white matter bundles, which is based on comparison of infant and adult groups using the Mahalanobis distance computed from four complementary ...

Added: October 22, 2015