Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience
Lang Chen, Psychology & Neuroscience
Dr. Lang Chen's research focuses on employing a multi-level analytical framework for investigating individual differences in behavioral, cognitive and neural profiles of differentiation between distinct numerical operations in young children. The study revealed that children with lower math abilities showed undifferentiated performance on addition and subtraction tasks, and more interestingly, their neural activity patterns for these two operations were quite similar across a distributed brain network supporting quantity, phonological, attentional, semantic and control processes. These findings identify the lack of distinct neural representations as a novel neurobiological feature of individual differences in children's numerical problem-solving abilities and an early developmental biomarker of low math skills. These results have been published in several peer-reviewed articles including:
- Linear and nonlinear profiles of weak behavioral and neural differentiation between numerical operations in children with math learning difficulties, Lang Chen, Teresa Iuculano, Percy Mistry, Jonathan Nicholas, Yuan Zhang, Vinod Menon, Neuropsychologia, Volume 160, 2021
- Category-specific activations depend on imaging mode, task demand, and stimuli modality: An ALE meta-analysis, Kimberly D. Derderian, Xiaojue Zhou, Lang Chen, Neuropsychologia, Volume 161, 2021
Multi-level analytical framework for investigating individual differences in behavioral, cognitive and neural profiles of differentiation between distinct numerical operations.