ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the possible role that individual difference in brain functions might play in individual differences in arithmetic. Some patients with widespread brain damage affecting many other cognitive functions have shown unimpaired arithmetical ability. Arithmetical cognition as a whole can be selectively impaired or preserved, and this seems often to be associated with selective impairment or preservation of the parietal areas of the brain. With the development of increasingly sophisticated techniques of functional brain imaging, the evidence from patients has received increasing support from imaging studies of people without brain damage. The brain studies as a whole give increasing evidence that different components of arithmetic and of number representation can involve different areas and networks of the brain. Relevant differences in brain functioning may involve differences in functioning of brain areas specifically related to arithmetic; or differences in functioning of brain areas that involve non-numerical skills that are related to arithmetical performance.
