Numerical magnitude in the human parietal lobe; tests of representational generality and domain specificity

Abstract

Behavioral evidence suggests that human adults have a single system for representing the numerical magnitude of both symbolic numbers (e.g., Arabic digits) and nonsymbolic number stimuli (e.g., dot arrays). Brain imaging studies have implicated a specific parietal region in symbolic number processing, leading to the influential hypothesis that this region is the locus of a dedicated, domain-specific number system. Here we evaluated a prediction of this hypothesis, that this region should be activated not only by symbolic but also nonsymbolic number processing. Using nonsymbolic stimuli, we tested for higher parietal activations for number than for nonnumber comparison tasks (experiment 1), fMRI adaptation for numerosity repetition (experiment 2), and greater fMRI increases with increasing task difficulty for number than nonnumber tasks (experiment 3). None of these predictions were supported by the data, posing a serious challenge to the hypothesis that a single, domain-specific parietal region underlies both symbolic and nonsymbolic number representation.