NEURAL CORRELATES OF NUMERICAL COGNITION IN GIFTED AND NON-GIFTED ADOLESCENTS: A MAGNETOENCEPHALOGRAPHY STUDY WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR NEUROPEDAGOGY

Autori

  • Tania Badarne Department of Mathematics, Bar Ilan University, Israel
  • Mina Teicher Department of Mathematics, Bar Ilan University, Israel

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46827/ejes.v13i9.6961

Parole chiave:

neuropedagogy, magnetoencephalography, numerical cognition, gifted learners, event-related potentials, mathematical education, occipital cortex

Abstract

The present study employs magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine event-related potential (ERP) differences between gifted and non-gifted adolescents during mathematical tasks involving numerical enumeration and simple addition. Drawing on the framework of neuropedagogy — an emerging interdisciplinary field that bridges brain science, cognitive science, and educational practice — the research investigates which cortical regions are differentially activated when children engage with counting, enumeration, and digit identification. Forty-three participants aged 12 to 15 years were allocated to four groups defined by giftedness classification and sex. MEG data were preprocessed using Fieldtrip (MATLAB) and subjected to independent component analysis (ICA) for artifact removal; features extracted from region-of-interest (ROI)-averaged waveforms included peak amplitude, root mean square (RMS), mean absolute amplitude, peak latency, and spectral power across the alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and theta frequency bands. Group-level analyses using t-tests with false discovery rate (FDR) correction revealed that gifted children exhibited reliably higher occipital amplitude measures when all trials were pooled, a pattern that intensified specifically during addition (SUM) trials. Across both groups, digit identification consistently elicited greater oscillatory amplitude than addition — particularly in beta and gamma bands over parietal, frontal, and temporal ROIs — consistent with the lower computational demands of perceptual relative to arithmetic processing. By-digit analyses, treated as exploratory, suggested that larger digits (7 and 8) elicited greater neural effort than smaller ones, and that gifted children showed distinct occipital latency profiles for specific digits. These findings contribute to growing evidence that numerical cognition recruits differentially organized cortical networks in gifted learners and carry direct implications for evidence-based instructional design.

Biografie autore

  • Tania Badarne, Department of Mathematics, Bar Ilan University, Israel

    Tania Badarne, Department of Mathematics, Bar Ilan University, Israel.

    ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1379-3076

    E-mail: taniaba800@gmail.com

  • Mina Teicher, Department of Mathematics, Bar Ilan University, Israel

    Mina Teicher, Department of Mathematics, Bar Ilan University, Israel; Department of Mathematics and Gonda Brain Research Center; Director, Emmy Noether Institute for Mathematics, Israel.

    E-mail: minateicher@gmail.com

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Pubblicato

2026-08-26

Fascicolo

V. 13 N. 9 (2026)

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Articles

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