Biology subjects

Potier-Watkins, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Potier-Watkins, C..

4 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

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↗

bioRxiv2023

Why do young readers vary in reading fluency? The impact of word length and frequency in French 6th graders

PurposeWhich processes induce variations in reading speed in young readers with the same amount of education, but different levels of reading fluency? Here, we tested a prediction of the dual-route model: as fluency increases, these variations may reflect a decreasing reliance on decoding and an increasing reliance on the lexical route. Method1,500 French 6th graders passed a one-minute speeded reading-aloud task evaluating fluency, and a 10-minute computerized lexical decision task evaluating the impact of word length, word frequency and pseudoword type. ResultsAs predicted, the word length effect varied dramatically with reading fluency, with the least fluent group showing a length effect even for frequent words. The frequency effect also varied, but solely in proportion to overall slowness, suggesting that frequency affects the decision stage in all readers, while length impacts poor readers disproportionately. Response times and errors were also affected by pseudoword type (e.g. letter substitutions or transpositions), but these effects did not vary much with fluency. Overall, lexical decision variables were excellent predictors of reading fluency (r=0.62). ConclusionOur results call attention to middle-school reading difficulties and encourage the use of lexical decision as a test of students mental lexicon and the automatization of reading.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

Data plots are widely used in science, journalism and politics, since they efficiently allow to depict a large amount of information. Graphicacy, the ability to understand graphs, thus became a fundamental cultural skill. Here, we introduce a new measure of graphicacy that assesses the ability to detect a trend in noisy scatterplots ("does this graph go up or down?"). In 3943 educated participants, responses vary as a sigmoid function of the t-value that a statistician would compute to detect a significant trend. We find a minimum level of core graphicacy even in unschooled participants living in remote Namibian villages (N=87) and 6-year-old 1st-graders who never read a graph (N=27). However, the sigmoid slope (the "graphicacy index") varies across participants, increases with education, and tightly correlates with statistical knowledge, showing that experience contributes to refining graphical intuitions. Our tool is publicly available online and allows to quickly evaluate intuitive graphics skills. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCEThe rising cost of gas, the number of Covid deaths, the evolution of temperatures during the summer months: we often face graphs depicting these phenomena. The scientific literature has shown that human adults can intuit, within milliseconds, the statistical trend of these graphs. However, we do not know if these intuitions generalized to unschooled people and, most importantly, how to measure their variations in the population. In this study we show that intuitive graphics skills are present even in 6-year-old children who never saw a graph and in the Himba of Namibia, an indigenous people with no access to formal schooling. Furthermore, we developed a quantitative assessment of such intuitive graphics skills (which we called the "graphicacy index"), that everyone can easily obtain for free, through a short (10 minutes) online test: https://neurospin-data.cea.fr/exp/lorenzo-ciccione/graphicacy-index/. In summary, our study provides the first attempt to formally quantify human intuitions of statistical graphs.

scientific communication and education↗