Abstract
The role of angular gyrus (AG) in arithmetic processing remains a subject of debate. In the present study, we recorded from the AG, supramarginal gyrus (SMG), intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and superior parietal lobule (SPL) across 467 sites in 30 subjects performing addition or multiplication with digits or number words. We measured the power of high-frequency-broadband (HFB) signal, a surrogate marker for regional cortical engagement, and used single-subject anatomical boundaries to define the location of each recording site. Our recordings revealed the lowest proportion of sites with activation or deactivation within the AG compared to other subregions of the inferior parietal cortex during arithmetic processing. The few activated AG sites were mostly located at the border zones between AG and IPS, or AG and SMG. Additionally, we found that AG sites were more deactivated in trials with fast compared to slow response times. The increase or decrease of HFB within specific AG sites was the same when arithmetic trials were presented with number words versus digits and during multiplication as well as addition trials. Based on our findings, we conclude that the prior neuroimaging findings of so-called activations in the AG during arithmetic processing could have been due to group-based analyses that might have blurred the individual anatomical boundaries of AG or the subtractive nature of the neuroimaging methods in which lesser deactivations compared to the control condition have been interpreted as “activations”. Our findings offer a new perspective with electrophysiological data about the engagement of AG during arithmetic processing.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available but the processed data to reproduce the main analysis and figures can be shared by the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We are thankful to neurosurgeons Dr. Larry Shuer, Jaimie Henderson, and Vivek Buch for performing the implantation of electrodes; the members of the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit for providing support during the research recordings; and Dr. Svenja Caspers for helping us confirm the anatomical boundaries of each parietal subregion at each individual subject level.
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Funding was provided by National Institute of Mental Health (Grant No. MH109954).
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Pinheiro-Chagas, P., Chen, F., Sabetfakhri, N. et al. Direct intracranial recordings in the human angular gyrus during arithmetic processing. Brain Struct Funct 228, 305–319 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-022-02540-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-022-02540-8