Executive functioning (EF) is consistently implicated in the growth of academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. Deficits in EF often accompany learning disorders such as dyslexia and dyscalculia. Despite their well-established link, we lack a nuanced understanding of the specific neurobiological mechanisms that integrate the higher-order cognitive processes of EF with the control of lower-level cognition related to domain-specific skills. Current cognitive models often focus on the “domain-general” nature of EF, but much can be learned by embracing “task impurity” and empirically evaluating the interplay of domain-specific processing with higher-order cognitive constructs. Dr. Wilkey will argue that the focus on the domain-generality of EF has impeded exploration of its domain-specific roots.
Using the example of number processing, Dr. Wilkey will detail a series of neuroimaging studies exploring how domain-specific mechanisms interact with domain-general processing. These studies show that congruent and incongruent trials in a traditional non-symbolic number comparison task elicit different levels of activation in areas of the parietal lobe known to encode number. They also suggest that neural signatures associated with processing the congruency of visual cues, and not simply number in general, relate to mathematics achievement. Finally, these data suggest that the uniquely predictive nature of incongruent trials holds across multiple achievement levels, from children with developmental dyscalculia to their typically achieving peers. These data provide promising insights about how we might further our understanding of the influence of domain-general processing on domain-specific academic skill development.