Abstract
The present study investigated changes in cortical oxygenation during mental arithmetic using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Twenty-nine male volunteers were examined using a 52-channel continuous wave system for analyzing activity in prefrontal areas. With the help of a probabilistic mapping method, three regions of interest (ROIs) on each hemisphere were defined: The inferior frontal gyri (IFG), the middle frontal gyri (MFG), and the superior frontal gyri (SFG). Oxygenation as an indicator of functional brain activation was compared over the three ROI and two levels of arithmetic task difficulty (simple and complex additions). In contrast to most previous studies using fMRI or NIRS, in the present study arithmetic tasks were presented verbally in analogue to many daily life situations. With respect to task difficulty, more complex addition tasks led to higher oxygenation in all defined ROI except in the left IFG compared to simple addition tasks. When compared to the channel positions covering different gyri of the temporal lobe, the observed sensitivity to task complexity was found to be restricted to the specified ROIs. As to the comparison of ROIs, the highest oxygenation was found in the IFG, while MFG and SFG showed significantly less activation compared to IFG. The present cognitive-neuroscience approach demonstrated that NIRS is a suitable and highly feasible research tool for investigating and quantifying neural effects of increasing arithmetic task difficulty.
Highlights
Basic mental arithmetic bears a helping hand in many occasions of daily life
As to accuracy of performance, the hit rate of 0.93 ± 0.01 observed under the simple arithmetic (SA) condition was reliably higher than the hit rate of 0.77 ± 0.03 observed under the complex arithmetic (CA) condition [t(28) = 6.8; p < 0.001; d = 1.79]
In the present study, changes in prefrontal cortical blood oxygenation during mental arithmetic were quantified by means of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)
Summary
Basic mental arithmetic bears a helping hand in many occasions of daily life. It is essential for time management, is a central aspect of mathematical achievement in school, and supports us in many everyday life decisions as for instance in grocery stores. Mental arithmetic can be studied, for example, in the form of precursors of mathematical skills (e.g., counting, number sense; Gilmore et al, 2010), and the mastery of more and more complex mental arithmetic tasks in ontogeny provides a window for studying the constituents of these mental operations (Wynn, 1992; Geary, 1995; Lee et al, 2012; Van Der Ven et al, 2012). A cognitiveneuroscience approach is presented aiming at identifying and quantifying (in terms of blood oxygen consumption) neural correlates involved in the mastery of simple and more complex mental addition tasks
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