As any child knows, to answer the question “how many,” one must start by adding up individual objects in a group. This cognitive ability is shared by animals as diverse as humans and birds. Surprisingly, the exact brain mechanisms responsible for this process remained unknown until now.

Jamie Roitman, Elizabeth Brannon, and Michael Platt from the University of Illinois at Chicago report novel evidence for the existence of “accumulator neurons,” which respond to increasing numbers of items in a display with progressively increasing activity, in the parietal cortex of monkeys.

The authors focused on the parietal cortex based on evidence that damage to this brain region disrupts basic mathematical skills, and is activated during functional imaging studies when people perform basic computations.

To understand how parietal cortex contributes to numerical behavior, the authors studied the activity of neurons in the lateral intraparietal area in monkeys while they looked at arrays of dots on a computer screen. Parietal neurons responded with progressively increasing activity as the total number of elements in the display was varied across a wide range of values (2-32).

These neurons resemble “accumulator neurons” that have been suggested to serve the first stage in counting. This information could be used by other neurons that respond best for a particular cardinal number, such as “4,” as have been reported in prior studies. These findings support computer models that separate the processes of summing and numerical identification, and may also explain the fact that parietal cortex damage causes both numerical and spatial confusion.

Citation: Roitman JD, Brannon EM, Platt ML (2007) Monotonic coding of numerosity in macaque lateral intraparietal area. PLoS Biol 5(8): e208. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio. 0050208.