Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 10, 2026
A Free-breathing fMRI Method to Study Human Olfactory Function
Published on: July 30, 2017
Magnitude processing of symbolic and non-symbolic proportions: an fMRI study
Julia Mock1, Stefan Huber2, Johannes Bloechle2,3
1Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Schleichstraße 6, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany. j.mock@iwm-tuebingen.de.
Background:
Recent research indicates that processing proportion magnitude is associated with activation in the intraparietal sulcus. Thus, brain areas associated with the processing of numbers (i.e., absolute magnitude) were activated during processing symbolic fractions as well as non-symbolic proportions. Here, we investigated systematically the cognitive processing of symbolic (e.g., fractions and decimals) and non-symbolic proportions (e.g., dot patterns and pie charts) in a two-stage procedure. First, we investigated relative magnitude-related activations of proportion processing. Second, we evaluated whether symbolic and non-symbolic proportions share common neural substrates.
Methods:
We conducted an fMRI study using magnitude comparison tasks with symbolic and non-symbolic proportions, respectively. As an indicator for magnitude-related processing of proportions, the distance effect was evaluated.
Results:
A conjunction analysis indicated joint activation of specific occipito-parietal areas including right intraparietal sulcus (IPS) during proportion magnitude processing. More specifically, results indicate that the IPS, which is commonly associated with absolute magnitude processing, is involved in processing relative magnitude information as well, irrespective of symbolic or non-symbolic presentation format. However, we also found distinct activation patterns for the magnitude processing of the different presentation formats.
Conclusion:
Our findings suggest that processing for the separate presentation formats is not only associated with magnitude manipulations in the IPS, but also increasing demands on executive functions and strategy use associated with frontal brain regions as well as visual attention and encoding in occipital regions. Thus, the magnitude processing of proportions may not exclusively reflect processing of number magnitude information but also rather domain-general processes.
More Related Videos
08:42Design and Implementation of an fMRI Study Examining Thought Suppression in Young Women with, and At-risk, for Depression
Published on: May 19, 2015
10:09Transferring Cognitive Tasks Between Brain Imaging Modalities: Implications for Task Design and Results Interpretation in fMRI Studies
Published on: September 22, 2014
Related Concept Videos
02:36Lewis Symbols and the Octet Rule
02:31Elements: Chemical Symbols and Isotopes
Some symbols are derived from the common English name of the element; others are abbreviations of the name in another language — Latin, Greek or German. For example, the symbol for aluminum (common name)...
01:09Chemical Symbols
Some symbols are derived from the common name of the element; others are abbreviations of the name in another language. Most symbols have one or two letters, but three-letter symbols have been used...
01:20Sample Proportion and Population Proportion
01:15Orders of Magnitude
The order of magnitude is simply a way of rounding numbers consistently to the nearest power of 10. This makes doing rough mental math...
01:24Testing a Claim about Population Proportion
There are two methods of testing a claim about a population proportion: (1) Using the sample proportion from the data where a binomial distribution is approximated to the normal distribution and (2) Using the binomial probabilities calculated from the data.
The first method uses normal distribution as an approximation to the binomial distribution. The requirements are as follows: sample size is large...