{"pk":49403,"title":"Symbolic numerical generalization through representational alignment","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The mapping between nonsymbolic quantities and symbolic\nnumbers lays the foundation for mathematical development\nin children. However, the neural mechanisms underlying\nthis crucial cognitive bridge remain unclear. Here, we in-\nvestigate the computational principles governing symbolic-\nnonsymbolic integration using a biologically inspired neural\nnetwork trained through developmentally inspired stages. Our\ninvestigation reveals that generalization from nonsymbolic to\nsymbolic numerical processing emerges specifically when rep-\nresentational alignment forms between these numerical for-\nmats. Notably, this alignment appears to be stronger in cross-\nformat comparison-based mapping compared to direct-label-\nbased mapping. Furthermore, we demonstrate that subsequent\nsymbolic specialization creates a representational divergence\nthat impairs nonsymbolic performance while maintaining the\nordinal structure of the mapping. These findings highlight rep-\nresentational alignment as a fundamental mechanism in nu-\nmerical cognition and suggest that targeted cross-format com-\nparison tasks may be particularly effective in improving math-\nematical learning in children with numerical processing diffi-\nculties.\nKeywords: Emergence of number semantics, Representa-\ntional alignment, Artificial neural network","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Artificial Intelligence; Cognitive Neuroscience; Representation; Semantic memory; Computational Modeling; Computational neuroscience; Neural Networks"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zz1n5nx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Anthony","middle_name":"","last_name":"Strock","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Ruizhe","middle_name":"","last_name":"Liu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Rishab","middle_name":"S","last_name":"Iyer","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Percy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mistry","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford Unversity","department":""},{"first_name":"Vinod","middle_name":"","last_name":"Menon","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49403/galley/37365/download/"}]}