Attentional amplification of neural codes for number independent of other quantities along the dorsal visual stream

Abstract

Humans and other animals base important decisions on estimates of number, and intraparietal cortex is thought to provide a crucial substrate of this ability. However, it remains debated whether an independent neuronal processing mechanism underlies this 'number sense', or whether number is instead judged indirectly on the basis of other quantitative features. We performed high-resolution 7 Tesla fMRI while adult human volunteers attended either to the numerosity or to an orthogonal dimension (average item size) of visual dot arrays. Numerosity explained a significant amount of variance in activation patterns, above and beyond non-numerical dimensions. Its representation was progressively enhanced along the dorsal visual pathway and was selectively amplified by attention when task relevant. These results reveal a dedicated extraction mechanism for numerosity that operates independently of other quantitative dimensions of the stimuli, and suggest that later stages along the dorsal stream are most important for the explicit manipulation of numerical quantity.