Neurocognitive accounts of developmental dyscalculia and its remediation

Teresa Iuculano (1, 2, 3)

1 UPD5 SHS - Université Paris Descartes - Faculté des Sciences humaines et sociales - Sorbonne
2 Stanford School of Medicine [Stanford]
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Numbers are one of the most pervasive stimulus categories in our environment and an integral foundation of modern society. Yet, up to 20% of individuals fail to understand, represent, and manipulate numbers and form the basis of arithmetic, a condition termed developmental dyscalculia (DD). Multiple cognitive and neural systems including those that serve numerical, mnemonic, visuospatial, and cognitive control functions have independently been implicated in the etiology of DD, yet most studies have not taken a comprehensive or dynamic view of the disorder. This chapter supports the view of DD as a multifaceted neurodevelopmental disorder that is the result of multiple aberrancies at one or multiple levels of the information processing hierarchy, which supports successful arithmetic learning, and suggests that interventions should target all these systems to achieve successful outcomes, at the behavioral and neural levels.

Mots clés: Brain plasticity; Development; Developmental dyscalculia; Education; Learning; Neurocognitive systems; Systems neuroscience.

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Teresa Iuculano. Neurocognitive accounts of developmental dyscalculia and its remediation. Progress in Brain Research: The Mathematical Brain Across the Lifespan, pp.305-333, 2016, ⟨10.1016/bs.pbr.2016.04.024⟩. ⟨halshs-02960625⟩