The ABC of cardinal and ordinal number representations

Numerical cognition encompasses the concepts of quantity ('how many?') and serial order ('which position?'). Yet, although numbers can convey different meanings, a recent imaging study by Fias and coworkers showed that ranking letters in the alphabet is subserved by a cortical network highly similar to that involved in judging magnitudes. In terms of neural processing, quantity and rank might just be two sides of the same coin.

[1]  S. Dehaene,et al.  The mental representation of parity and number magnitude. , 1993 .

[2]  S. Dehaene,et al.  THREE PARIETAL CIRCUITS FOR NUMBER PROCESSING , 2003, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[3]  Matthew Botvinick,et al.  From Numerosity to Ordinal Rank: A Gain-Field Model of Serial Order Representation in Cortical Working Memory , 2007, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[4]  ROBERT S. MOYER,et al.  Time required for Judgements of Numerical Inequality , 1967, Nature.

[5]  H. Wiese.  Numbers, language, and the human mind , 2003 .

[6]  Wim Fias,et al.  The mental representation of ordinal sequences is spatially organized , 2003, Cognition.

[7]  John Jonides,et al.  Order Information in Working Memory: fMRI Evidence for Parietal and Prefrontal Mechanisms , 2000, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[8]  J. Hamilton,et al.  The Symbolic Distance Effect for Alphabetic Order Judgements: A Subjective Report and Reaction Time Analysis , 1978 .

[9]  Andreas Nieder,et al.  Temporal and Spatial Enumeration Processes in the Primate Parietal Cortex , 2006, Science.

[10]  Xavier Seron,et al.  Dissociation Between Order and Quantity Meanings in a Patient with Gerstmann Syndrome , 2002, Cortex.

[11]  D. Norris,et al.  THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1996, 49A (1), 80 ± 115 Unchained Memory: Error Patterns Rule out Chaining Models of Immediate Serial Recall , 2022 .

[12]  J. Tanji,et al.  Integration of temporal order and object information in the monkey lateral prefrontal cortex. , 2004, Journal of neurophysiology.

[13]  Andreas Nieder,et al.  Neuronal population coding of continuous and discrete quantity in the primate posterior parietal cortex , 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[14]  G. Denes,et al.  A specific deficit for numbers in a case of dense acalculia. , 1991, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[15]  G. Orban,et al.  Processing of Abstract Ordinal Knowledge in the Horizontal Segment of the Intraparietal Sulcus , 2007, The Journal of Neuroscience.