Richard Davis Holmes1, Silvia Mazabel2,
Burkhard Maedler3, Christian Denk, Linda Siegel4,
Christian Beaulieu5, Alex MacKay6
1UBC MRI Research Centre, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; 2Department
of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, University
of British Columbia; 3Philips Medical Systems; 4Department
of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education, University
of British Columbia; 5Department of Biomedical Engineering,
University of Alberta; 6Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of British Columbia
Structural
imaging applied to children with wide ranging mathematical abilities has the
potential to elucidate the question of what neural circuits underly
computation based tasks. The present investigation analyzed the myelin water
fraction images of 20 children in a standard space to deduce correlations
between myelin content and math abilities. Subjects wrote a calculation-based
test and an applied problem-based test. The results implicated
occipital/parietal white matter, the
right anterior limb of the internal capsule and the left external
capsule with positive correlations of 0.61,0.65 and 0.60, respectively.