Biology subjects

Becuwe, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Becuwe, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Brain mechanisms of mathematical development: A longitudinal fMRI study from preschool to second grade

How does the developing brain, initially equipped only with elementary mathematical intuitions, acquire higher mathematical concepts? Through a longitudinal functional MRI study of children from preschool through first and second grade, we tracked how neural responses to mathematical and non-mathematical statements change in the first two years of formal schooling and use the data to evaluate several theories of developmental change. Before school, when listening to math statements, children already engage an adult-like cortical network, with partial specialization for geometry. Over the first two years of school, we observe an overall increase in math-related activation, a small recruitment of additional neural territory, reduced activation for facts that get better known, and a small overall increase in the dimensionality of representational space. fMRI responses to individual sentences suggest that these mechanisms, particularly in left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral intraparietal sulcus, all contribute to childrens growing mastery of mathematical concepts.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Languages of the brain: fMRI dissection of the amodal networks for language, mathematics, and social knowledge

The ability to compose complex mental representations by recombining simpler primitives is a characteristic of the human brain that manifests itself in a variety of domains such as spoken or written language, mathematics, or social reasoning. While it is known that these domains rest on partially distinct brain networks, they are rarely investigated together in the same paradigm. Here, we present a systematic functional MRI study of written and spoken word and sentence processing in each of these domains. In a true-false judgment task, adult participants were presented with a hierarchy of meaningless and meaningful stimuli bearing on various domains of general semantic knowledge and mathematics. The results show that distinct brain regions are activated by (1) syntax and semantics; (2) math versus non-math knowledge; (3) different domains of mathematics, such as geometry versus arithmetic; (4) social knowledge versus other knowledge. All of these regions are activated essentially identically in the written and spoken modalities. The results were replicated in a group of adolescents. Our experiments show that the human brain comprises distinct amodal networks for various domains of linguistic and semantic knowledge, and provide a simple paradigm to dissect them within a short fMRI session.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Impact of education and music training on the development of early abstraction abilities

Platos Republic, Einsteins Theory of relativity, Vilvadis Four Seasons are all remarkable examples of humans unique ability to create and manipulate complex abstract structures, whether in language, mathematics or music. Yet the mechanisms by which children develop such abstract thinking, and the role of education and structured experiences such as musical practice in shaping these abilities remain unclear. To explore these questions, we conducted cross-sectional behavioral experiments with 566 children aged 4 to 8, spanning four educational grades, half of whom participated in a violin training program since the age of four. Two experiments examined how children encode, process and compress auditory sequences and visual patterns, while a third examined their sensitivity to geometric regularities. Our results reveal the emergence of symbolic reasoning as early as the start of formal schooling, yet with deeper abstraction as a function of grade. By first grade, children encoded complex auditory sequences within a Language of Thought (LoT) similar to adults. Additionally, when confronted with quadrilaterals, children showed increasing sensitivity to geometric regularities, suggesting a developmental transition from perceptual to symbolic reasoning. However, we did not observe significant impact of musical practice on abstraction abilities across any of the domains tested. We discuss whether and how the impact of education and extracurricular activities such as music could be enhanced.

neuroscience↗