Temporal and spatial enumeration processes in the primate parietal cortex.
Humans and animals can nonverbally enumerate visual items across time in a sequence or rapidly estimate the set size of spatial dot patterns at a single glance. We found that temporal and spatial enumeration processes engaged different populations of neurons in the intraparietal sulcus of behaving monkeys. Once the enumeration process was completed, however, another neuronal population represented the cardinality of a set irrespective of whether it had been cued in a spatial layout or across time. These data suggest distinct neural processing stages for different numerical formats, but also a final convergence of the segregated information to form most abstract quantity representations.
Nieder
Andreas
A
Primate NeuroCognition Laboratory, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, Department of Cognitive Neurology, University of Tübingen, Otfried-Müller-Strasse 27, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. andreas.nieder@uni-tuebingen.de
Diester
Ilka
I
Tudusciuc
Oana
O
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004594:Electrophysiology; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D008433:Mathematics; D008606:Mental Processes; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D012044:Regression Analysis; D013997:Time Factors