Developmental fronto-parietal shift of brain activation during mental arithmetic across the lifespan: A registered report protocol.

Christina Artemenko,Jérôme Prado

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0256232

Abstract

Arithmetic processing is represented in a fronto-parietal network of the brain. However, activation within this network undergoes a shift from domain-general cognitive processing in the frontal cortex towards domain-specific magnitude processing in the parietal cortex. This is at least what is known about development from findings in children and young adults. In this registered report, we set out to replicate the fronto-parietal activation shift for arithmetic processing and explore for the first time how neural development of arithmetic continues during aging. This study focuses on the behavioral and neural correlates of arithmetic and arithmetic complexity across the lifespan, i.e., childhood, where arithmetic is first learned, young adulthood, when arithmetic skills are already established, and old age, when there is lifelong arithmetic experience. Therefore, brain activation during mental arithmetic will be measured in children, young adults, and the elderly using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Arithmetic complexity will be manipulated by the carry and borrow operations in two-digit addition and subtraction. The findings of this study will inform educational practice, since the carry and borrow operations are considered as obstacles in math achievement, and serve as a basis for developing interventions in the elderly, since arithmetic skills are important for an independent daily life.

Highlights

Arithmetic skills are acquired in school and are later important for everyday life
The only study on the neural correlates of the carry and borrow effects that was not conducted in young adults found the left angular gyrus (AG) to be reversely related to the carry effect in adolescents, reflecting the role of arithmetic fact retrieval for decomposed addition [8]
The current study aims to investigate the behavioral and neural correlates of the carry and borrow effects in children, young adults, and the elderly, and to explore developmental changes

Summary

Introduction

Arithmetic skills are acquired in school and are later important for everyday life. it is essential to better understand the underlying mechanisms of these skills in children, who just learnt these skills, and in adults, who have already established their arithmetic skills, and in the elderly, because deficits in these skills have a detrimental impact on their independent life. The step is to replicate the developmental changes of arithmetic in general and place-value computation in particular (i.e., carry and borrow effects), to identify the underlying processing characteristics (i.e., categorical and continuous aspects) across the lifespan, and to complement the behavioral findings by neural data. The current study aims to investigate the behavioral and neural correlates of the carry and borrow effects in children, young adults, and the elderly, and to explore developmental changes. H2: In an effect-based approach, the carry and borrow effects are expected to decrease arithmetic performance on a behavioral level (i.e., reaction times and error rates) and to be associated with larger frontal activation (left IFG and bilateral MFG) on a neural level in all age groups. The current study makes use of the advantages of fNIRS to study arithmetic in an ecological valid task paradigm (verbal production) in critical populations such as children and the elderly

Participants

Findings

Procedure