Temporal abnormalities in children with developmental dyscalculia

Abstract

Recent imaging studies have associated Developmental dyscalculia (DD) to structural and functional alterations corresponding Parietal and the Prefrontal cortex (PFC). Since these areas were shown also to be involved in timing abilities, we hypothesized that time processing is abnormal in DD. We compared time processing abilities between 10 children with pure DD (8 years old) and 11 age-matched healthy children. Results show that the DD group underestimated duration of a sub-second scale when asked to perform a time comparison task. The timing abnormality observed in our DD participants is consistent with evidence of a shared fronto-parietal neural network for representing time and quantity.