Project description
Decoding the relationship between space and numbers in the brain
Space, time and numbers provide a priori intuitions that structure how humans experience their environment. Research in cognitive science has showed that the temporal, spatial, and numerical representations of a stimulus can interact with each other. Numerical-spatial associations (NSA) are indeed pervasive in humans. An example is the tendency to map increasing numerical magnitudes with a left-to-right orientation in the brain. The EU-funded SPANUMBRA project will conduct research to shed further insight into the developmental, neural and genetic origins of NSA in animals and humans. Research findings will help inform treatments for conditions such as dyscalculia, which causes difficulty in processing numbers.
Objective
Research in cognitive science has revealed that the temporal, spatial, and numerical features of a stimulus can interact with one another. An example is the tendency to map increasing numerical magnitudes with a left-to-right orientation. Numerical-spatial associations (NSA) are pervasive in human behaviour and have relevance to health (e.g. dyscalculia is thought to be related to improper understanding of the so-called «mental number line»). NSA have been shown to occur in human newborns and in non-human animals for non-symbolic numerousness. SPANUMBRA aims to investigate NSA in different animal models (domestic chicks, mice and zebrafish) and in human neonates and infants to provide a comprehensive and comparative perspective on the developmental, neural and genetic origins of this phenomenon. The project will be guided by a new hypothesis that links the direction of NSA to a differential role of the two sides of the brain to the perceived value (valence) of changes in magnitudes. The role of the experience (WP1) in the development of NSA will be investigated making use of early exposure to light in chicks’ embryos to modulate brain asymmetry, and controlled-rearing experiments in which newly-hatched chicks will be exposed to correlated and anti-correlated discrete and continuous magnitudes. Development of NSA will be also studied in human neonates and infants (WP2) before, during, and after the exposure to culture-specific NSA associations (numbers organized in spatially oriented layouts) to investigate the role of culture in shaping/reinforcing NSA. The study of the neural basis of the NSA (WP3) will combine neurobiological techniques (immediate early gene expression in chicks and zebrafish), and non-invasive methods (EEG and fNIRS in human neonates). The genetic bases of NSA (WP4) will be investigated using transgenic lines of zebrafish and mice, in order to understand the role of some genes implicated in the development of lateralization and in dyscalculia.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
38122 Trento
Italy