Electrophysiological evidence for notation independence in numerical processing.docVIP

Behavioral and Brain Functions BioMedCentral Research Open Access Electrophysiological evidence for notation independence in numerical processing Melissa E Libertus*1,2, Marty G Woldorff1,2,3 and Elizabeth M Brannon1,2 Address: 1Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Box 90999, Duke University, NC 27708, USA, 2Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Box 90086, Duke University, NC 27708, USA and 3Department of Psychiatry, Duke University, NC 27708, USA Email: Melissa E Libertus* - melissa.libertus@; Marty G Woldorff - woldorff@; Elizabeth M Brannon - brannon@ * Corresponding author Published: 10 January 2007 Received: 22 July 2006 Accepted: 10 January 2007 Behavioral and Brain Functions 2007, 3:1 doi:10.1186/1744-9081-3-1 This article is available from: /content/3/1/1 ? 2007 Libertus et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: A dominant view in numerical cognition is that numerical comparisons operate on a notation independent representation (Dehaene, 1992). Although previous human neurophysiological studies using scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) on the numerical distance effect have been interpreted as supporting this idea, differences in the electrophysiological correlates of the numerical distance effect in symbolic notations (e.g. Arabic numerals) and non- symbolic notations (e.g. a set of visually presented dots of a certain number) are not entirely consistent with this view. Methods and results: Two experiments were conducted to resolve these discrepancies. In Experiment 1, participants performed a symbolic and a non-symbolic numerical comparison task (smaller or larger than 5?) with numerical values 1–4 and 6–9 while ERPs were