Research Interests for Elizabeth M. Brannon

Dr. Brannon's research program examines the evolution and development of quantitative cognition. She studies how number, time, and spatial extent are represented by adult humans, infants, young children and nonhuman animals without language. With her collaborators at Duke she applies behavioral techniques, event-related potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and single-unit physiology to explore the cognitive and neural underpinnings of numerical cognition in nonhuman primates and throughout the human lifespan.

Keywords:

numerical cognition, infant cognition, animal cognition

Current projects:

Number and time discrimination in infants

Electrophysiological correlates of timing and counting in human infants

Psychophysics of numerical discrimination in monkeys and lemurs

Electrophysiology of number representation in monkeys

Neural correlates of number in adults and children

using fMRI

Representative Publications   (search)

1. Jordan, K.E., MacLean, E., & Brannon, E.M., Monkeys match and tally quantities across senses, Cognition, vol. 108 no. 3 (2008), pp. 617-625.
2. Brannon, E.M., Libertus, M. Meck, W.H., Woldorff, M., Electrophysiological measures of time processing in infant and adult brains: Weber's law holds, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 20 no. 2 (2008), pp. 193-203.
3. Cordes, S., Brannon, E.M, The difficulties of representing continuous extent in infancy: Using number is just easier, Child Development, vol. 79 no. 2 (2008), pp. 476-489.
4. Cantlon, J.F. & Brannon, E.M., Basic math in monkeys and college students, PLoS Biology, vol. 5 no. 12 (2007), pp. e328.
5. Roitman, J., Brannon. E.M. & Platt, M.L., Monotonic coding of numerosity in Macaque lateral intraparietal area, PLoS Biology, vol. 5 no. 8 (2007), pp. e208.
6. Brannon E.M., Suanda, U., Libertus, K, Temporal discrimination increases in precision over development and parallels the development of numerosity discrimination, Developmental Science, vol. 10 no. 6 (2007), pp. 770-777.
7. Brannon, E.M., The representation of numerical magnitude, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 16 (2006), pp. 222-229.
8. Cantlon, J., & Brannon, E.M., Carter, E.J., & Pelphrey, K., Functional imaging of numerical processing in adults and 4-y-old children, PLOS Biology, vol. 4 no. 5 (2006), pp. e125, 1-11.