< Back to previous page

Project

fMRI-based decoding of neural representations in mathematics and reading disorders.

Specific disorders in learning to read and to calculate affect about 1 out of 20 individuals. Converging evidence suggests that these disorders are related to deviations in specific mental representations, i.e. magnitude representations in the case of mathematics disorders, and phonological representations in the case of reading disorders. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been able to identify the regions in the brain that contain these representations. However, the existing fMRI studies have only provided limited and indirect knowledge about how particular processes are computed or represented in the identified brain areas. To probe such questions, a new imaging analysis approach called Multi-Voxel Pattern Analysis has been developed in recent years. In this approach, researchers analyze the spatial profile of the fMRI signal in particular brain areas, or across the brain at large, with advanced pattern analyses and data reduction techniques - including neural networks, support vector machines, and multidimensional scaling. Here we propose a series of experiments with this methodology to investigate how the neural representations of magnitude and phonology in individuals with disorders in mathematics and reading, respectively, differ from the representations in the brains of individuals without these difficulties.
Date:1 Jan 2012 →  31 Dec 2015
Keywords:Phonology, Magnitude, Decoding, Multi-voxel pattern analysis, fMRI, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia
Disciplines:Biological and physiological psychology, General psychology, Other psychology and cognitive sciences