Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fractions processing is a topic of major interest both innumerical cognition and mathematics education. Theliterature on the processing of common fractions has focusedon whether fractions are compared by their magnitude orthrough their components. Only a few neuroimaging studieshave looked at this question. The N400 component,traditionally seen in linguistic semantic congruency event-related-potential (ERPs) experimental designs, has beenadapted to study arithmetic processing. Observing the N400,allows the study of how different arithmetic componentsaffect overall processing. In this study, an N400 paradigm isused to investigate semantic congruency during a fractionmagnitude comparison task (Match/Mismatch) in 24 adults.Behavioral results reveal interference by shared componentsacross the compared fractions. EEG analysis results show anN400-like difference wave between Match and Mismatchconditions. Shared components modulate the latency of thisN400 effect. These results show the N400 as a viable methodfor studying fractions.