The cognitive and neural basis of mathematical performance : evidence from meta-analytic and experimental approaches
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Cognitive skills like working memory and reasoning are associated with academic achievement. These skills have been consistently correlated with performance across different academic areas, including math and reading, and thus, are named domain-general abilities. Despite their well-replicated relations with academic skills, the behavioral and neural underpinnings of these domain-general effects are not fully understood. This dissertation explores how domain-general cognitive mechanisms contribute to academic achievement, focusing particularly on mathematics and its relationship to reading. It consists of three studies. In the first study, I conducted two meta-analyses to examine the link between different mathematics and reading skills and the role of domain-general cognitive abilities in the observed relations. The initial analysis (378 studies, 1,282,796 participants) revealed an overall significant relation (r=0.52), as were all associations between specific reading and mathematics measures (rs = 0.23 to 0.61, ps<.05). The subsequent analysis (138 studies, 39,836 participants) showed domain-general cognitive model explained most of the covariance between reading and mathematics outcomes, indicating the associations are largely due to domain-general processes. In the second study, I applied activation probability estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to neuroimaging data (537 experiments) to identify common brain networks involved in reading and math associated with domain-general processes identified in the first study. The results revealed cognitive control networks, including salience, cingulo-opercular, and fronto-parietal networks, involved in domain-general processes associated with mathematics and reading. In the third study, I used an experimental dual-task design to examine domain-general mechanisms in mathematics. By manipulating cognitive and visual demands in algebra tasks, I tested how working memory supports symbolic and spatial algebra and whether its effects are specific to algebra or generalizable in other mathematics domains, including arithmetic and geometry. The results revealed that domain-general attention mechanisms help actively maintain working memory items while performing algebraic and arithmetic tasks and are involved in mathematics performance. Taken together, these studies are advancing our understanding of how domaingeneral cognitive mechanisms function in mathematics, shedding light on their behavioral and neural underpinnings. The findings have implications for the design of educational interventions that target general cognitive processes to support academic learning.
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Ph. D.