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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Exploring the Neural Representation of Elementary Math Concepts

Samuel Debray¹, Daniela Valerio, Alireza Karami², Maxime Cauté, Stanislas Dehaene; ¹Université Paris-Saclay / CEA, ²CEA

Presenter: Samuel Debray

Mathematical cognition engages a distributed network of brain regions, but the fine-grained organization of this network remains unclear. Using high-resolution 7T fMRI, we investigate how elementary math concepts from two domains - arithmetics (integers and fractions) and geometry (shapes) - are represented in the brain. We test whether these concepts are neurally organized not only by category but also according to shared numerical magnitude. Behavioral similarity judgments reveal consistent cross-category associations between concepts with equivalent magnitudes (e.g. "three" and "triangle"). In the brain, we observe distinct activation patterns for arithmetic versus geometric items, and further differentiation between integers and fractions - refining prior accounts of the math network’s structure. Although direct magnitude-based correspondence was not detected in neural similarity patterns, semantic distances derived from GloVe embeddings significantly predict both behavioral judgments and neural representations in parietal and temporal regions. These findings offer new insights into how mathematical concepts are structured and encoded in the human brain.

Topic Area: Object Recognition & Visual Attention

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF