Biology subjects

Van Rinsveld, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Van Rinsveld, A..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Automatic extraction of meaning from visual number symbols detected by frequency-tagged EEG in children.

Symbolic number representation and manipulation is key for successful mathematical learning. However, the mechanism by which at some point in development number symbols (i.e., 1, 2, 3, etc.) begin to automatically elicit useful meaning remains unresolved. Previous evidence highlighted that it is not possible to ignore the numerical magnitude when looking at number symbols, at least for adults. However, the neural mechanism behind the progressive automatization of symbol processing remains largely unknown, namely because these kinds of cognitive processes are difficult to isolate due to the general cognitive skills involved in any explicit task design. We thus developed an experimental paradigm specifically targeting the neural correlates of implicit magnitude representations by frequency-tagging magnitude changes within a visual stream of digits. Automatic magnitude processing was assessed by presenting a stream of number symbols with a frequency-tagged change of magnitude allowing to identify automatic categorization of the symbols by their magnitude in (pre)school-aged children. Stimuli were displayed with a sinusoidal contrast modulation at the frequency of 10 Hz and Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials were recorded. These electrophysiological measurements showed a neural synchronization at the harmonics of the frequency of the magnitude changes recorded on electrodes encompassing bilateral occipitoparietal regions. The current findings indicate that magnitude is a salient semantic feature of the number symbols, which is deeply associated to digits in long-term memory across development. Significance StatementAcquiring strong semantic representations of numbers is crucial for future math achievement. However, the learning stage where magnitude information becomes automatically elicited by number symbols (i.e., Arabic digits from 1 to 9) remains unknown, namely due to the difficulty to measure unintentional automatic processing of magnitudes. We used a new experimental paradigm especially targeting the neural mechanisms involved in the automatic processing of magnitude information conveyed by number symbols. Frequency-tagged electrophysiological responses have the advantage to provide large amounts of reliable data with a high signal-to-noise ratio in a minimal amount of time. The current study is the first to take advantage of this in developmental populations to understand early automatic magnitude representations in childrens numeracy development. The electrophysiological responses demonstrate that the magnitude information is already automatically accessed from number symbols in children at the end of preschool, highlighting the importance of the first years of life for building automatized magnitude processing skills.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Educational Environment and White Matter Development in Early Adolescence

Coarse measures of socioeconomic status, such as parental income or parental education, have been linked to differences in white matter development. However, these measures do not provide insight into specific aspects of an individuals environment and how they relate to brain development. On the other hand, educational intervention studies have shown that changes in an individuals educational context can drive measurable changes in their white matter. These studies, however, rarely consider socioeconomic factors in their results. In the present study, we examined the unique effect of educational opportunity on white matter development, even when controlling other known socioeconomic factors. To explore this question, we leveraged the rich demographic and neuroimaging data available in the ABCD study, as well the unique data-crosswalk between ABCD and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA). We find that educational opportunity is related to accelerated white matter development, even when accounting for other socioeconomic factors, and that this relationship is most pronounced in white matter tracts associated with academic skills. These results suggest that the school a child attends has a measurable impact on brain development for years to come.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Automatic processing of numerosity in human neocortex evidenced by occipital and parietal neuromagnetic responses

Humans and other animal species are endowed with the ability to sense, represent, and mentally manipulate the number of items in a set without needing to count them. One central hypothesis is that this ability relies on an automated functional system dedicated to numerosity, the perception of the discrete numerical magnitude of a set of items. This system has classically been associated with intraparietal regions, however accumulating evidence in favor of an early visual number sense calls into question the functional role of parietal regions in numerosity processing. Targeting specifically numerosity among other visual features in the earliest stages of processing requires high temporal and spatial resolution. We used frequency-tagged magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate the early automatic processing of numerical magnitudes and measured the steady-state brain responses specifically evoked by numerical and other visual changes in the visual scene. The neuromagnetic responses showed implicit discrimination of numerosity, total occupied area, and convex hull. The source reconstruction corresponding to the implicit discrimination responses showed common and separate sources along the ventral and dorsal visual pathways. Occipital sources attested the perceptual salience of numerosity similarly to both other implicitly discriminable visual features. Crucially, we found parietal responses uniquely associated with numerosity discrimination, showing automatic processing of numerosity in the parietal cortex, even when not relevant to the task. Taken together, these results provide further insights into the functional roles of parietal and occipital regions in numerosity encoding along the visual hierarchy. Significance StatementApproximating the number of items in a set has been identified as a building block of mathematical cognition but the processing of numerosity is not fully understood. The natural correlation between numerosity and other visual features makes it difficult to test whether the number of items is a perceptual primitive or whether it needs to be recombined at a higher level. We used frequency-tagged magnetoencephalography to localize the implicit discrimination of numerosity within the visual hierarchy. We found that numerosity yielded occipital responses, supporting that the human visual system can grasp it at a single glance. Crucially, numerosity also yielded specific parietal responses, showing that numerosity is a perceptual primitive with a unique automatic involvement of parietal cortex.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Spontaneous and automatic processing of magnitude and parity information of Arabic digits: A frequency-tagging EEG study.

Arabic digits (1-9) are everywhere in our daily lives. These symbols convey various semantic information, and numerate adults can easily extract from them several numerical features such as magnitude and parity. Nonetheless, since most studies used active processing tasks to assess these properties, it remains unclear whether and to what degree the access to magnitude and especially to parity is automatic. Here we investigated with EEG whether spontaneous processing of magnitude or parity can be recorded in a frequency-tagging approach, in which participants are passively stimulated by fast visual sequences of Arabic digits. We assessed automatic magnitude processing by presenting a stream of frequent small digit numbers mixed with deviant large digits (and the reverse) with a sinusoidal contrast modulation at the frequency of 10 Hz. We used the same paradigm to investigate numerical parity processing, contrasting odd digits to even digits. We found significant brain responses at the frequency of the fluctuating change and its harmonics, recorded on electrodes encompassing right occipitoparietal regions, in both conditions. Our findings indicate that both magnitude and parity are spontaneously and unintentionally extracted from Arabic digits, which supports that they are salient semantic features deeply associated to digit symbols in long-term memory.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

The neural signature of numerosity: Separating numerical and continuous magnitude extraction in early visual cortex with frequency-tagged EEG

The ability to handle approximate quantities, or number sense, has been recurrently linked to mathematical skills, though the nature of the mechanism allowing to extract numerical information (i.e., numerosity) from environmental stimuli is still debated. A set of objects is indeed not only characterized by its numerosity but also by other features, such as the summed area occupied by the elements, which often covary with numerosity. These intrinsic relations between numerosity and non-numerical magnitudes led some authors to argue that numerosity is not independently processed but extracted through a weighting of continuous magnitudes. This view cannot be properly tested through classic behavioral and neuroimaging approaches due to these intrinsic correlations. The current study used a frequency-tagging EEG approach to separately measure responses to numerosity as well as to continuous magnitudes. We recorded occipital responses to numerosity, total area, and convex hull changes but not to density and dot size. We additionally applied a model predicting primary visual cortex responses to the set of stimuli. The model output was closely aligned with our electrophysiological data, since it predicted discrimination only for numerosity, total area, and convex hull. Our findings thus demonstrate that numerosity can be independently processed at an early stage in the visual cortex, even when completely isolated from other magnitude changes. The similar implicit discrimination for numerosity as for some continuous magnitudes, which correspond to basic visual percepts, shows that both can be extracted independently, hence substantiating the nature of numerosity as a primary feature of the visual scene.

neuroscience↗