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Southampton University Cognitive Sciences Center

Monday 28 April 1997, 4.00 pm, Room 3095, Level 3, Shackleton Building


    PSYCHOLOGY AND NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF NUMBERS

    Professor Brian Butterworth, University College, London

    ABSTRACT: Is knowledge of number and simple arithmetic part of
    "ordinary" semantic memory, mixed up with general knowledge and
    organised according to the usual principles - acquisition history,
    multidimensional similarity, etc? Or is it a separate mental and
    neural domain, with its own organisational principles? Our studies
    of neuropsychological patients show that number abilities
    dissociate from general cognitive abilities, from language ability,
    from reading abilities and from Short-Term Memory.  Of course, the
    lesion sites for the number deficits is quite different from
    deficits of language and semantic memory. Within the number domain,
    patient studies suggest functional subdivisions for transcoding
    numbers vs calculation; and within calculation, for arithmetic
    facts, conceptual knowledge and calculation procedures. There is
    evidence that the organising principles of stored number knowledge
    is indeed domain specific.

Cipolotti, L., Butterworth, B. & Denes, G. (1991) A specific deficit for
numbers in a case of dense acalculia. Brain, 114, 2619-2637

Cipolotti, L. & Butterworth, B. (1995) Towards a model a multiroute model
of number processing: impaired number transcoding with the preservation of
calculation skills.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 124, 375-390
Butterworth, B., Cipolotti, L. & Warrington, E.K. (1996) Short-term memory
impairments and arithmetical ability. Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology. 49A, 251-262

Professor Brian Butterworth is currently, Professor of Cognitive
Neuropsychology at UCL and Editor of the journal "Mathematical
Cognition".He is on the Executive Committee of the new Institute of
Cognitive Neurscience at UCL. His main areas of research are speech
production and its disorders, reading and its disorders (especially of
non-alphabetic scripts), and mathematical cognition. He is very keen to
contact anyone who has great difficulty with numbers.





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