Frontoparietal white matter diffusion properties predict mental arithmetic skills in children

Abstract

Functional MRI studies of mental arithmetic consistently report blood oxygen level-dependent signals in the parietal and frontal regions. We tested whether white matter pathways connecting these regions are related to mental arithmetic ability by using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to measure these pathways in 28 children (age 10 -15 years, 14 girls) and assessing their mental arithmetic skills. For each child, we identified anatomically the anterior portion of the superior longitudinal fasciculus (aSLF), a pathway connecting parietal and frontal cortex. We measured fractional anisotropy in a core region centered along the length of the aSLF. Fractional anisotropy in the left aSLF positively correlates with arithmetic approximation skill, as measured by a mental addition task with approximate answer choices. The correlation is stable in adjacent core aSLF regions but lower toward the pathway endpoints. The correlation is not explained by shared variance with other cognitive abilities and did not pass significance in the right aSLF. These measurements used DTI, a structural method, to test a specific functional model of mental arithmetic.individual differences ͉ development ͉ diffusion tensor imaging ͉ mathematics ͉ superior longitudinal fasciculus

White Matter Microstructure in Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus Associated with Spatial Working Memory Performance in Children

“…Being one of the major fiber bundles connecting frontoparietal regions the SLF is likely implicated in high-order cognitive processing and increased FA values have been associated with verbal abilities (Tamnes et al, 2010;Gold, Powell, Xuan, Jiang, & Hardy, 2007) and arithmetic skills (Tsang et al, 2009) in regions corresponding to the left SLF. Further, a DTI study found verbal working memory performance in schizophrenia patients and healthy participants to be correlated with FA in left SLF (Karlsgodt et al, 2008).…”

Structure-function relationships underlying calculation: A combined diffusion tensor imaging and fMRI study

“…This approach avoids the potential disadvantages of the voxel-based approaches, such as the need for larger sample sizes and artifacts caused by spatial normalization or smoothing techniques (Jones et al, 2005;Niogi et al, 2007), which often make it impossible to distinguish between differences in microstructure and those attributable to variability in gross anatomical shape and size. Regions were selected on the basis of a previous finding outlining the SCR as a key white matter region associated with general arithmetical abilities (van Eimeren et al, 2008) and the SLF having been previously associated with approximate but not exact arithmetic (Tsang et al, 2009).…”

“…In addition, FA values were also extracted from the left and the right SLF. As discussed above, the SLF has recently been associated with approximate but not exact arithmetic (Tsang et al, 2009) and thus provides another means to constrain the specificity of any relationships between the lSCR and activation of the lAG during exact calculation.…”

“…More recently, a study by Tsang et al (2009) investigated the relationship between the anterior portion of the superior longitudinal fasciculus (aSLF) and both approximate and exact arithmetic. The authors found that FA values in the left aSLF correlated with approximate but not exact addition or simple math facts.…”

Learning number sense through digital games with intrinsic feedback

“…b) DDs show differences in connectivity among the relevant parietal regions, and between these parietal regions and occipito-temporal regions associated with processing symbolic number form (Rykhlevskaia, Uddin, Kondos, & Menon, 2009), in comparison with typically developing learners. This means that DD learners have not sufficiently developed the structural connections between brain regions that coordinate the components needed for calculation (Price & Ansari, 2012;Tsang, Dougherty, Deutsch, Wandell, & Ben-Shachar, 2009). …”