Abstract
Number-line estimation (NLE) is a major behavioral marker of cognitive development because it tracks the shift from perceptual (analog) to symbolic development in mathematics performance (Opfer & Siegler). Despite many advances in developmental neuroimaging (Cantlon, 2020), there is no work to date using fMRI to evaluate the neural mechanisms of the NLE task in children (Kanayet et al., 2017; Vogel et al., 2013). This gap in developmental neuroimaging is important to fill because it will allow us to observe the neural events underlying a well-known analog-to-symbolic shift in children’s cognition. We designed and tested a novel NLE-comparison task for developmental fMRI research. In this task, children (5 – 7 years old) indicated which of two presented locations on the number line was closer to the target numeral’s location. During the experimental runs, children completed blocks of trials composed of either the NLE-comparison task or a matched control task. We found significantly greater activation in the bilateral intraparietal sulcus during the NLE task than the control task, corroborating similar work examining the neural correlates of the NLE task in adults (Vogel et al., 2013). The present findings provide initial validation of the use of the NLE-comparison task as both a behavioral and neural measure of number line estimation.