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How does a child solve 7 + 8? Decoding brain activity patterns associated with counting and retrieval strategies.

ABSTRACT: Cognitive development and learning are characterized by diminished reliance on effortful procedures and increased use of memory-based problem solving. Here we identify the neural correlates of this strategy shift in 7-9-year-old children at an important developmental period for arithmetic skill acquisition. Univariate and multivariate approaches were used to contrast brain responses between two groups of children who relied primarily on either retrieval or procedural counting strategies. Children who used retrieval strategies showed greater responses in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; notably, this was the only brain region which showed univariate differences in signal intensity between the two groups. In contrast, multivariate analysis revealed distinct multivoxel activity patterns in bilateral hippocampus, posterior parietal cortex and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex regions between the two groups. These results demonstrate that retrieval and counting strategies during early learning are characterized by distinct patterns of activity in a distributed network of brain regions involved in arithmetic problem solving and controlled retrieval of arithmetic facts. Our findings suggest that the reorganization and refinement of neural activity patterns in multiple brain regions plays a dominant role in the transition to memory-based arithmetic problem solving. Our findings further demonstrate how multivariate approaches can provide novel insights into fine-scale developmental changes in the brain. More generally, our study illustrates how brain imaging and developmental research can be integrated to investigate fundamental aspects of neurocognitive development.

SUBMITTER: Cho S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3193275 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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How does a child solve 7 + 8? Decoding brain activity patterns associated with counting and retrieval strategies.

Cho Soohyun S Ryali Srikanth S Geary David C DC Menon Vinod V

Developmental science 20110425 5

Cognitive development and learning are characterized by diminished reliance on effortful procedures and increased use of memory-based problem solving. Here we identify the neural correlates of this strategy shift in 7-9-year-old children at an important developmental period for arithmetic skill acquisition. Univariate and multivariate approaches were used to contrast brain responses between two groups of children who relied primarily on either retrieval or procedural counting strategies. Childre ...[more]

PMID: 21884315

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Project description:Objective. Electrical recordings of neural activity from brain surface have been widely employed in basic neuroscience research and clinical practice for investigations of neural circuit functions, brain-computer interfaces, and treatments for neurological disorders. Traditionally, these surface potentials have been believed to mainly reflect local neural activity. It is not known how informative the locally recorded surface potentials are for the neural activities across multiple cortical regions.Approach. To investigate that, we perform simultaneous local electrical recording and wide-field calcium imaging in awake head-fixed mice. Using a recurrent neural network model, we try to decode the calcium fluorescence activity of multiple cortical regions from local electrical recordings.Main results. The mean activity of different cortical regions could be decoded from locally recorded surface potentials. Also, each frequency band of surface potentials differentially encodes activities from multiple cortical regions so that including all the frequency bands in the decoding model gives the highest decoding performance. Despite the close spacing between recording channels, surface potentials from different channels provide complementary information about the large-scale cortical activity and the decoding performance continues to improve as more channels are included. Finally, we demonstrate the successful decoding of whole dorsal cortex activity at pixel-level using locally recorded surface potentials.Significance. These results show that the locally recorded surface potentials indeed contain rich information of the large-scale neural activities, which could be further demixed to recover the neural activity across individual cortical regions. In the future, our cross-modality inference approach could be adapted to virtually reconstruct cortex-wide brain activity, greatly expanding the spatial reach of surface electrical recordings without increasing invasiveness. Furthermore, it could be used to facilitate imaging neural activity across the whole cortex in freely moving animals, without requirement of head-fixed microscopy configurations.

Dataset Information

How does a child solve 7 + 8? Decoding brain activity patterns associated with counting and retrieval strategies.

Publications

How does a child solve 7 + 8? Decoding brain activity patterns associated with counting and retrieval strategies.

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