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Coarse measures of socioeconomic status, such as parental income or parental education, have been linked to differences in white matter development. However, these measures do not provide insight into specific aspects of an individual’s environment and how they relate to brain development. On the other hand, educational intervention studies have shown that changes in an individual’s educational context can drive measurable changes in their white matter. These studies, however, rarely consider socioeconomic factors in their results. In the present study, we examined the unique relationship between educational opportunity and white matter development, when controlling other known socioeconomic factors. To explore this question, we leveraged the rich demographic and neuroimaging data available in the ABCD study, as well the unique data-crosswalk between ABCD and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA). We find that educational opportunity is related to accelerated white matter development, even when accounting for other socioeconomic factors, and that this relationship is most pronounced in white matter tracts associated with academic skills. These results suggest that the school a child attends has a measurable relationship with brain development for years to come.

Abstract How humans integrate and abstract numerical information across different formats is one of the most debated questions in human cognition. We addressed the neuronal signatures of the numerical integration using an EEG technique tagged at the frequency of visual stimulation. In an oddball design, participants were stimulated with standard sequences of numbers ( 5) was inserted at 1.25 Hz. We observed significant oddball amplitudes for all single notations, showing for the first time using this EEG technique, that the magnitude information is spontaneously and unintentionally abstracted, irrespectively of the numerical format. Significant amplitudes were also observed for digits—number words and number words—dots, but not for digits—dots, suggesting an automatic integration across some numerical formats. These results imply that direct and indirect neuro-cognitive links exist across the different numerical formats.

Abstract Arabic digits (1–9) are everywhere in our daily lives. These symbols convey various semantic information, and numerate adults can easily extract from them several numerical features such as magnitude and parity. Nonetheless, since most studies used active processing tasks to assess these properties, it remains unclear whether and to what degree the access to magnitude and especially to parity is automatic. Here we investigated with EEG whether spontaneous processing of magnitude or parity can be recorded in a frequency-tagging approach, in which participants are passively stimulated by fast visual sequences of Arabic digits. We assessed automatic magnitude processing by presenting a stream of frequent small digit numbers mixed with deviant large digits (and the reverse) with a sinusoidal contrast modulation at the frequency of 10 Hz. We used the same paradigm to investigate numerical parity processing, contrasting odd digits to even digits. We found significant brain responses at the frequency of the fluctuating change and its harmonics, recorded on electrodes encompassing right occipitoparietal regions, in both conditions. Our findings indicate that both magnitude and parity are spontaneously and unintentionally extracted from Arabic digits, which supports that they are salient semantic features deeply associated to digit symbols in long-term memory.

Basic numerical abilities are generally assumed to influence more complex cognitive processes involving numbers, such as mathematics. Yet measuring non-symbolic number abilities remains challenging due to the intrinsic correlation between numerical and non-numerical dimensions of any visual scene. Several methods have been developed to generate non-symbolic stimuli controlling for the latter aspects but they tend to be difficult to replicate or implement. In this study, we describe the NASCO method, which is an extension to the method popularized by Dehaene, Izard, and Piazza (2005). Their procedure originally controlled for two visual dimensions that are mediated by Number: Total Area and Item Size (i.e., N = TA/IS). Here, we additionally propose to control for another twofold dimension related to the array extent, which is also mediated by Number: Convex Hull Area and Mean Occupancy (i.e., N = CH/MO). We illustrate the NASCO method with a MATLAB app—NASCO app—that allows easy generation of dot arrays for a visually controlled assessment of non-symbolic numerical abilities. Results from a numerical comparison task revealed that the introduction of this twofold dimension manipulation substantially affected young adults’ performance. In particular, we did not replicate the relation between non-symbolic number abilities and arithmetic skills. Our findings open the debate about the reliability of previous results that did not take into account visual features related to the array extent. We then discuss the strengths of NASCO method to assess numerical ability, as well as the benefits of its straightforward implementation in NASCO app for researchers.

Format changes in U.S. schooling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic varied by month and by school district, ranging from exclusively home-based to full in-person learning. The impact of these changes on adolescent schooling experiences, and the factors that mitigate such impact, have been challenging to quantify. To address these challenges we employed bi-monthly repeated surveys of youths (N = 6, 546, aged 13–14 years) in a longitudinal study, starting before the pandemic peak (October 2020) and continuing through one year after the pandemic was declared (March 2021). We investigated how school format (in-person vs. remote) impacted objective time spent on academic activities and the subjective experience of school, and how these were influenced by parental engagement. Periods of exclusive at-home remote schooling were pervasive—reported by more than 60% of youths—and linked to a reduction in school enjoyment and time spent on reading, math, and science. In contrast, such periods were linked to more time with parents or guardians helping with school activities, and the frequency of such parental involvement was associated with reductions in negative feelings about school. Results point to potential pathways to mitigate the negative consequences of future school disruptions.

Socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with larger COVID-19 disease burdens and pandemic-related economic impacts. We utilized the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to understand how family- and neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage relate to disease burden, family communication, and preventative responses to the pandemic in over 6,000 youth-caregiver dyads. Data were collected at three timepoints (May–August 2020). Here, we show that both family- and neighborhood-level disadvantage were associated with caregivers' reports of greater family COVID-19 disease burden, less perceived exposure risk, more frequent caregiver-youth conversations about COVID-19 risk/prevention and reassurance, and greater youth preventative behaviors. Families with more socioeconomic disadvantage may be adaptively incorporating more protective strategies to reduce emotional distress and likelihood of COVID-19 infection. The results highlight the importance of caregiver-youth communication and disease-preventative practices for buffering the economic and disease burdens of COVID-19, along with policies and programs that reduce these burdens for families with socioeconomic disadvantage.

Number transcoding is the cognitive task of converting between different numerical codes (i.e. visual “42”, verbal “forty-two”). Visual symbolic to verbal transcoding and vice versa strongly relies on language proficiency. We evaluated transcoding of German-French bilinguals from Luxembourg in 5th, 8th, 11th graders and adults. In the Luxembourgish educational system, children acquire mathematics in German (LM1) until the 7th grade, and then the language of learning mathematic switches to French (LM2). French `70s `80s `90s are less transparent than `30s `40s `50s numbers, since they have a base-20 structure, which is not the case in German. Transcoding was evaluated with a reading aloud and a verbal-visual number matching task. Results of both tasks show a cognitive cost for transcoding numbers having a base-20 structure (i.e. `70s, `80s and `90s), such that response times were slower in all age groups. Furthermore, considering only base-10 numbers (i.e. `30s `40s `50s), it appeared that transcoding in LM2 (French) also entailed a cost. While participants across age groups tended to read numbers slower in LM2, this effect was limited to the youngest age group in the matching task. In addition, participants made more errors when reading LM2 numbers. In conclusion, we observed an age-independent language effect with numbers having a base-20 structure in French, reflecting their reduced transparency with respect to the decimal system. Moreover, we find an effect of language of math acquisition such that transcoding is less well mastered in LM2. This effect tended to persist until adulthood in the reading aloud task, while in the matching task performance both languages become similar in older adolescents and young adults. This study supports the link between numbers and language, especially highlighting the impact of language on reading numbers aloud from childhood to adulthood.

Since more than 15 years, researchers have been expressing their interest in evaluating the Approximate Number System (ANS) and its potential influence on cognitive skills involving number processing, such as arithmetic. Although many studies reported significant and predictive relations between ANS and arithmetic abilities, there has recently been an increasing amount of published data that failed to replicate such relationship. Inconsistencies lead many researchers to question the validity of the assessment of the ANS itself. In the current meta-analysis of over 68 experimental studies published between 2004 and 2017, we show that the mean value of the Weber fraction (w), the minimal amount of change in magnitude to detect a difference, is very heterogeneous across the literature. Within young adults, w might range from < 10 to more than 60, which is critical for its validity for research and diagnostic purposes. We illustrate here the concern that different methods controlling for non-numerical dimensions lead to substantially variable performance. Nevertheless, studies that referred to the exact same method (e.g., Panamath) showed high consistency among them, which is reassuring. We are thus encouraging researchers only to compare what is comparable and to avoid considering the Weber fraction as an abstract parameter independent from the context. Eventually, we observed that all reported correlation coefficients between the value of w and general accuracy were very high. Such result calls into question the relevance of computing and reporting at all the Weber fraction. We are thus in disfavor of the systematic use of the Weber fraction, to discourage any temptation to compare given data to some values of w reported from different tasks and generation algorithms.