Dissociating the solution processes of small, large, and zero multiplications by means of fMRI
Section snippets
Participants
Seventeen right-handed students of the University of Marburg participated. They were native speakers of German, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and no history of neurological illness. Informed written consent was obtained, and participants received monetary compensation. One participant had to be excluded from the analysis due to excessive movement in the scanner. The final sample comprised 10 women and 6 men. Mean age was 24.5 years (range: 20–30 years).
Stimuli and task
Participants silently produced
Behavioral data
Performance was assessed by means of verification accuracy. All participants reached a predefined criterion of at least 75% correct responses. Mean accuracy was 95, 96, and 89% for zero, small, and large multiplications, respectively, and 93% for storage. Post-hoc t tests showed that large problems differed significantly (p < .05) from the other conditions.
fMRI results
First, we contrasted small multiplications with the storage condition. This contrast should delineate areas that are generally involved in
Discussion
We investigated the neural substrates of single-digit multiplications in a calculation task in which multiplication results had to be silently produced. Based on previous findings, we assumed that multiplications with versus without zero invoke distinct solution routes, i.e., rule application and fact retrieval, respectively. The results support this idea. The different problem types were found to be dissociable on a neural level, substantiating the assumed functional differences. Further
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grant Ro529/17 from the German Research Foundation (DFG) assigned to Frank Rösler. The manuscript was finished while FR spent an academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin whose support is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Oliver Stock and Lisa Putzar for help in collecting the data. We also thank Frank Domahs and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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