Christina Artemenko

Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen (Germany) · Department of Psychology

Nous présentons l’instrument de mesure Math4Speed (M4S), un test papier-crayon combinant les quatre opérations arithmétiques avec des items de complexité variable. Le test M4S comprend 50 problèmes d’addition, 50 problèmes de soustraction, 50 problèmes de multiplication et 50 problèmes de division, limités à 2 minutes par opération. L’évaluation ps...

Significance A shared understanding of terminology is essential for clear scientific communication and minimizing misconceptions. This is particularly challenging in rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary domains that utilize functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), where researchers come from diverse backgrounds and apply their expertise in fi...

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease (PD) have a huge impact on patients, caregivers, and the health care system. Until now, diagnosis of mild cognitive impairments in PD has been established based on domain‐general functions such as executive functions, attention, or working memory. However, specific numerical deficits observed i...

In neuroimaging research, efforts to enhance replication and reproducibility have increased the focus on improving transparency, particularly in the complex data analysis processes. We conducted a multi-lab collaborative study involving 38 international teams that analyzed two functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) datasets. These teams test...

The potential influence of culture on functional lateralization is a rarely investigated topic, yet it may be an important factor in our understanding of the human brain. In numerical processing, evidence was found for differential directional preferences of space-number associations in cultures with opposite reading direction systems. This may aff...

While general cognitive skills decline during aging, numerical skills seem to be mainly preserved. Such skills are essential for an independent life up to old age, e.g., when dealing with money or time. Operating with numbers usually requires number magnitude and place-value processing. The question is whether these processes are negatively affecte...

Although math anxiety has been extensively studied, its interplay with other emotional and attitude constructs is still unclear. The present dataset includes math anxiety and arithmetic performance alongside different types of anxiety (i.e., state, test, general anxiety and neuroticism) and attitudes towards math (i.e., math self-concept, math self...

Neuromodulation with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is an increasingly popular research tool to experimentally manipulate cortical areas and probe their causal involvements in behavior, but its replicability and regional specificity are not clear. This registered report investigated cathodal tDCS effects on spatial–numerical associa...

Functional lateralization was previously established for various cognitive domains—but not for number processing. Although numbers are considered to be bilaterally represented in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), there are some indications of different functional roles of the left vs. right IPS in processing number pairs with small vs. large distance...

Functional lateralization was previously established for various cognitive domains – but not for number processing. Although numbers are considered to be bilaterally represented in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), there are some indications of different functional roles of the left vs. right IPS in processing number pairs with small vs. large distan...

This large, international dataset contains survey responses from N = 12,570 students from 100 universities in 35 countries, collected in 21 languages. We measured anxieties (statistics, mathematics, test, trait, social interaction, performance, creativity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation), self-efficacy, persistence, and...

Arithmetic skills are needed at any age. In everyday life, children to older adults calculate and deal with numbers. The processes underlying arithmetic seem to change with age. From childhood to young adulthood, children get better in domain-specific numerical skills such as place-value processing. From younger to older adulthood, domain-general c...

Significance The expansion of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) methodology and analysis tools gives rise to various design and analytical decisions that researchers have to make. Several recent efforts have developed guidelines for preprocessing, analyzing, and reporting practices. For the planning stage of fNIRS studies, similar guida...

This large, international dataset contains survey responses from N = 12,570 students from 100 universities in 35 countries, collected in 21 languages. We measured anxieties (statistics, mathematics, test, trait, social interaction, performance, creativity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation), self-efficacy, persistence, and...

Significance: The expansion of fNIRS methodology and analysis tools give rise to various design and analytical decisions researchers have to make. Several recent efforts have developed guidelines for preprocessing, analyzing, and reporting practices. For the planning stage of fNIRS studies, similar guidance would be desirable. Study preregistration...

While arithmetic training reduces fronto-temporo-parietal activation related to domain-general processes in typically developing (TD) children, we know very little about the training-related neurocognitive changes in children with mathematical disabilities (MD), who seek evidenced-based educational interventions. In a within-participant design, a g...

In everyday life, adults need to manipulate numbers in several ways. A large range of measures evaluating arithmetic fluency is currently used, differing in definitions and operationalizations of the underlying construct. The basic arithmetic operations include addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Here, we introduce an instrument fo...

Most children use their fingers when learning to count and calculate. These sensorimotor experiences were argued to underlie reported behavioral associations of finger gnosis and counting with mathematical skills. On the neural level, associations were assumed to originate from overlapping neural representations of fingers and numbers. This study e...

Mathematics anxiety (MA) is negatively associated with mathematics performance. Although some aspects, such as mathematics self‐concept (M self‐concept), seem to modulate this association, the underlying mechanism is still unclear. In addition, the false gender stereotype that women are worse than men in mathematics can have a detrimental effect on...

Teachers are strong role models for their pupils, especially at the beginning of education. This also holds true for math: If teachers feel anxious about math, the consequences on the mathematical education of their pupils is detrimental. Previous studies have shown that (future) elementary school teachers have higher levels of math anxiety than mo...

Mathematics anxiety (MA) is negatively associated with mathematics performance. Although some aspects, such as mathematics self-concept (M-self-concept), seem to modulate this association, the underlying mechanism is still unclear. In addition, the false gender-stereotype according to which women are worse than men in mathematics, can have a detrim...

Arithmetic processing is represented in a fronto-parietal network of the brain. However, activation within this network undergoes a shift from domain-general cognitive processing in the frontal cortex towards domain-specific magnitude processing in the parietal cortex. This is at least what is known about development from findings in children and y...

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease (PD) have a huge impact on patients, caregivers, and the health‐care system. To date, the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairments in PD has been established based on domain‐general functions such as executive functions, attention, or working memory. However, specific numerical deficits observed...

Human behavior depends on the interplay between cognition and emotion. Negative emotions like anxiety affect performance, particularly in complex tasks, by limiting cognitive resources – known as the anxiety–complexity effect. This study set out to replicate the anxiety–complexity effect in a web-based experiment. We investigated individual differe...

Both linguistic and arithmetic task characteristics contribute to the difficulty of a word problem. However, the role of these characteristics and the exact cognitive processes underlying arithmetic word problems are often not clear, but they might be detectable by analysing eye-movement patterns. Not much is known about how eye-movements change un...

Children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) differ from typically developing (TD) children regarding brain activation. While arithmetic training reduces fronto-temporo-parietal activation related to domain-general processes in TD children, we do not know whether these findings also hold for children with DD. Since children with DD are one main tar...

Teachers are strong role models for their pupils, especially at the very beginning of education, and as such, pupils tend to share their teacher’s attitudes. This also holds true for math: If teachers feel anxious about math, the consequences on the mathematical education of their pupils is detrimental.Previous studies have shown that (future) elem...

Did you know that we can study the brain in the classroom? Many people think that studying the brain is only possible in complex laboratories with huge, complicated devices. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a new technique that uses light to monitor how active the brain is. fNIRS has several advantages that make it particularly good...

Functional lateralization is established for various cognitive functions, but was hardly ever investigated for arithmetic processing. Most neurocognitive models assume a central role of the bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in arithmetic processing and there is some evidence for more pronounced left-hemispheric activation for symbolic arithmetic...

Based on a theory of impulsive and reflective human behavior, we test the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeting either prefrontal or parietal cortex in either hemisphere. In a confirmatory registered report, cathodal tDCS is administered to conceptually reproduce tDCS modulations of implicit spatial-numerical associati...

It is under debate whether the neural representation of numbers and letters might rely on distinct neural correlates, or on a mostly shared neural network. In the present study, a total of 47 children in fifth grade (Experiment 1) and sixth grade (Experiment 2) simply copied numbers and letters on a touch screen while brain activation changes were...

Some individuals experience more difficulties with math than others, in particular when arithmetic problems get more complex. Math ability, on one hand, and arithmetic complexity, on the other hand, seem to partly share neural underpinnings. This study addresses the question of whether this leads to an interaction of math ability and arithmetic com...

Most studies have investigated brain activation changes after the course of arithmetic learning, and the question remains whether these changes are detectable during the course of learning, i.e., before memory consolidation. Twenty-four fifth graders solved multiplication problems while ongoing electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The arithme...

Math anxiety impairs academic achievements in mathematics. According to the processing efficiency theory (PET), the adverse effect is the result of reduced processing capacity in working memory (WM). However, this relationship has been examined mostly with correlational designs. Therefore, using an intervention paradigm, we examined the effects of...

Background Arithmetic processing in adults is known to rely on a frontal-parietal network. However, neurocognitive research focusing on the neural and behavioral correlates of arithmetic development has been scarce, even though the acquisition of arithmetic skills is accompanied by changes within the fronto-parietal network of the developing brain....

Mathematical abilities are essential for an individual, as they predict career prospects among many other abilities. However, little is known about whether neural correlates of arithmetic problem difficulty differ between individuals with high and low math ability. For instance, the difficulty of two-digit addition and subtraction increases wheneve...

Transcranial electric stimulation such as transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) have been used to investigate structure-function relationships in numerical cognition. Recently, tRNS was suggested to be more effective than tDCS. However, so far there is no evidence on the differential impact...

In our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to numbers and letters. However, it is still under debate how letters and numbers are processed in the brain, while information on this topic would allow for a more comprehensive understanding of, for example, known influences of language on numerical cognition or neural circuits shared by numerical cog...

Neurocognitive studies of arithmetic learning in adults have revealed decreasing brain activation in the fronto-parietal network, along with increasing activation of specific cortical and subcortical areas during learning. Both changes are associated with a shift from procedural to retrieval strategies for problem-solving. Here we address the criti...

A major goal of education in elementary mathematics is the mastery of arithmetic operations. However, research on subtraction is rather scarce, probably because subtraction is often implicitly assumed to be cognitively similar to addition, its mathematical inverse. To evaluate this assumption, we examined the relation between the borrow effect in s...

The investigation of the neural underpinnings of increased arithmetic complexity in children is essential for developing educational and therapeutic approaches and might provide novel measures to assess the effects of interventions. Although a few studies in adults and children have revealed the activation of bilateral brain regions during more com...

Arithmetic capabilities are complex cognitive skills essential for handling requirements of the modern world. At the same time, educational institutions are challenged with math-related problems, e.g., developmental dyscalculia and math anxiety, and also with less severe difficulties of arithmetic understanding. Thus, non-invasive techniques for co...

Actions are recognized faster and with higher accuracy when they take place in their typical environments. It is unclear, however, when contextual cues from the environment become effectively exploited during childhood and whether contextual integration interacts with other factors such as children's perceptual or motor experience with an action. I...

Math anxiety is a common phenomenon which can have a negative impact on numerical and arithmetic performance. However, so far little is known about the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. This mini review provides an overview of studies investigating the neural correlates of math anxiety which provide several hints regarding its influence on math...

Recent neuro-imaging research identified the bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS) to be a key area associated with number processing. However, causal structure-function relationships are hard to evaluate from neuro-imaging techniques such as fMRI. Nevertheless, brain stimulation methods like transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) allow for...