Characterizing the neural coding of symbolic quantities

Abstract

How the brain encodes abstract numerical symbols is a fundamental question in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience alike. Here we probe the nature of symbolic number representation in the brain by characterizing the neural similarity space for symbolic quantities in regions sensitive to their semantic content. In parietal and occipital regions, the similarity space of number symbols was positively predicted by the lexical frequency of numerals in parietal and occipital areas, and was unrelated to numerical ratio. These results are more consistent with a categorical, frequency-based account of symbolic quantity encoding. In contrast, the similarity space of analog quantities was positively predicted by ratio in prefrontal, parietal and occipital regions. We thus provide an explanation for why previous work has indicated that symbolic and analog quantities are distinct: number symbols operate primarily like discrete categories sensitive to input frequency, while analog quantities operate more like approximate perceptual magnitudes. In addition, we find substantial evidence for related patterns of activity across formats in prefrontal, parietal and occipital regions. Crucially however, between-format relations were not specific to individual quantities, indicating common processing as opposed to common representation. Moreover, evidence for between-format processing was strongest for quantities that could be represented as exact, discrete values in both systems (quantities in the 'subitizing' range: 1–4). In sum, converging evidence presented here indicates that symbolic quantities are coded in the brain as discrete categories sensitive to input frequency and largely independent of approximate, analog quantities.