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There is a growing body of evidence indicating a crucial role of Exner’s area in (hand-) writing symbolic codes such as letters and words. However, a recent study reported a patient with a lesion affecting Broca’s and Exner’s area, who suffered from severe peripheral agraphia for letters but not for Arabic digits. The authors suggested a speculative account postulating differential connectivity of Exner’s area for numbers and letters in order to explain this dissociation. In the present study, we evaluated this account, employing atlas-based tractography for the patient’s anatomy, deterministic fiber-tracking as well as an automated toolkit to investigate the connectivity of Exner’s area in healthy adults. In particular, fiber pathways connecting Exner’s area with areas associated with language processing (e.g., the arcuate fascicle, ventral pathways encompassing the external/extreme capsule system) reached the inferior part of Exner’s area, while fronto-parietal fibers (e.g., the superior longitudinal fascicle) connected the upper part of Exner’s area with the intraparietal sulcus typically involved in number processing. Our results substantiated the differential connectivity account for Exner’s area by identifying the neural connections between fiber tracts and cortex areas of interest. Our data strongly suggest that white matter connectivity should be taken into account when investigating the neural underpinnings of impaired and intact human cognition.
There is a growing body of evidence indicating a crucial role of Exner’s area in (hand-) writing symbolic codes such as letters and words. However, a recent study reported a patient with a lesion affecting Broca’s and Exner’s area, who suffered from severe peripheral agraphia for letters but not for Arabic digits. The authors suggested a speculative account postulating differential connectivity of Exner’s area for numbers and letters in order to explain this dissociation. In the present study, we evaluated this account, employing atlas-based tractography for the patient’s anatomy, deterministic fiber-tracking as well as an automated toolkit to investigate the connectivity of Exner’s area in healthy adults. In particular, fiber pathways connecting Exner’s area with areas associated with language processing (e.g., the arcuate fascicle, ventral pathways encompassing the external/extreme capsule system) reached the inferior part of Exner’s area, while fronto-parietal fibers (e.g., the superior longitudinal fascicle) connected the upper part of Exner’s area with the intraparietal sulcus typically involved in number processing. Our results substantiated the differential connectivity account for Exner’s area by identifying the neural connections between fiber tracts and cortex areas of interest. Our data strongly suggest that white matter connectivity should be taken into account when investigating the neural underpinnings of impaired and intact human cognition.
The Gerstmann syndrome is a constellation of neurological deficits that include agraphia, acalculia, left-right discrimination and finger agnosia. Despite a growing interest in this clinical phenomenon, there remains controversy regarding the specific neuroanatomic substrates involved. Advancements in data-driven, computational modeling provides an opportunity to create a unified cortical model with greater anatomic precision based on underlying structural and functional connectivity across complex cognitive domains. A literature search was conducted for healthy task-based functional MRI and PET studies for the four cognitive domains underlying Gerstmann’s tetrad using the electronic databases PubMed, Medline, and BrainMap Sleuth (2.4). Coordinate based, meta-analytic software was utilized to gather relevant regions of interest from included studies to create an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) map for each cognitive domain. Machine-learning was used to match activated regions of the activation likelihood estimation to the corresponding parcellation from the cortical parcellation scheme previously published under the Human Connectome Project (HCP). Diffusion spectrum imaging-based tractography was performed to determine the structural connectivity between relevant parcellations in each domain on 51 healthy subjects from the Human Connectome Project database. Ultimately 102 functional MRI studies met our inclusion criteria. A frontoparietal network was found to be involved in the four cognitive domains: calculation, writing, finger gnosis, and left–right orientation. There were three parcellations in the left hemisphere where the activation likelihood estimation of at least three cognitive domains were found to be overlapping, specifically the anterior intraparietal area (AIP), area 7 postcentral (7PC) and the medial intraparietal sulcus. These parcellations surround the anteromedial portion of the intraparietal sulcus. Area 7 postcentral was found to be involved in all four domains. These regions were extensively connected in the intraparietal sulcus as well as with a number of surrounding large-scale brain networks involved in higher-order functions. We present a tractographic model of the four neural networks involved in the functions which are impaired in Gerstmann syndrome. We identified a “Gerstmann Core” of extensively connected functional regions where at least 3 of the four networks overlap. These results provide clinically actionable and precise anatomic information which may help guide clinical translation in this region, such as during resective brain surgery in or near the intraparietal sulcus, and provides an empiric basis for future study.
Recent advances in pedagogical research have called attention to the dynamic nature of the teaching and learning process in which the actors mutually influence one another. The understanding of how this works in the brain—the specialized neural networks related to this process—is often limited to neuroscientists but are slowly becoming available to other learning scientists, including teachers. A transdisciplinary approach combining the best information about observable teaching-learning processes from education with newer information from the neurosciences may aid in resolving fundamental questions in the learning process. Teachers’ professional formation and development is often structured in segmented topical ways (e.g., pedagogy, evaluation, planning, classroom management, social–emotional learning), to identify important content knowledge (e.g., art, reading, mathematics, STEM), or to appreciate life skills (e.g., collaboration, critical thinking, social–emotional learning). While important, knowledge about the brain, the organ responsible for learning, is typically absent from teacher education. This paper reexamines the evidence from neuroconstructivism and the hierarchy of learning trajectories and combines it with evidence from psychology and the ways humans interact during the teaching-learning process to suggest radical neuroconstructivism as a framework within which to organize teachers’ professional development. The radical neuroconstructivism framework may contribute to making the content knowledge of teachers’ continual professional development more visible.
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