Arithmetic ability is critical for daily life, academic achievement, career development, and future economic success. Individual differences in arithmetic skills among children and adolescents are related to variations in brain structures. Most existing studies have used hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis. To identify distributed brain…

Algebraic thinking and strategy flexibility are essential to advanced mathematical thinking. Early algebra instruction uses 'missing-operand' problems (e.g., x - 7 = 2) solvable via two typical strategies: (1) direct retrieval of arithmetic facts (e.g., 9 - 7 = 2) and (2) performance of the inverse operation (e.g., 2 + 7 = 9). The current study…

Impaired procedural learning has been suggested as a possible cause of developmental dyslexia (DD) and specific language impairment (SLI). This study examined the relationship between measures of verbal and non-verbal implicit and explicit learning and measures of language, literacy and arithmetic attainment in a large sample of 7 to 8-year-old…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether individual differences in at-risk 4th graders' language comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, concept formation, working memory, and use of decimal labels (i.e., place value, point, incorrect place value, incorrect fraction, or whole number) are related to their decimal magnitude understanding.…

Data from both neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have implicated the left inferior parietal cortex in calculation. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the neural responses associated with the commission of calculation errors and how the processing of arithmetic errors is modulated by individual differences in mathematical…

Dot enumeration (DE) and number comparison (NC) abilities are considered markers of core number competence. Differences in DE/NC reaction time (RT) signatures are thought to distinguish between typical and atypical number development. Whether a child's DE and NC signatures change or remain stable over time, relative to other developmental…

Working memory (WM) has been associated with the acquisition of arithmetic skills, however, the components of WM that underlie this acquisition have not been explored. This study explored the contribution of two WM systems (the phonological loop and the central executive) to mathematical performance in young children. The results showed that a…

The study investigates the relationship between memory updating and arithmetic word problem solving. Two groups of 35 fourth graders with high and low memory-updating abilities were selected from a sample of 89 children on the basis of an updating task used by Palladino et al. ["Memory & Cognition" 29 (2002) 344]. The two groups were…