Research Interests for Elizabeth Brannon

The main focus of my research is how human adults, infants, and monkeys represent number. Numerical thinking allows a comparison of animal and adult human cognition because it involves abstract representations that do not rely on language and appear to be specialized and modularized. Equally important is understanding how numerical representations develop in the human lifespan and how language transorms these representations. My broad research goal is to determine the similarities and differences in the cognitive processes that human adults, human infants, and animals use in numerical thought and to explore the brain systems that support thinking about number.

Keywords:

Numerical cognition, infant cognition, animal cognition

Current projects:

Number and time discrimination in infants

Electrophysiological cortrelates of timing and counting in 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

1. Cantlon, J., & Brannon, E.M., Shared system for ordering small and large numbers in monkeys and humans, Psychological Science, vol. 17 no. 5 (2006), pp. 401-406.
2. Cantlon, J.F., & E.M. Brannon, Semantic congruity facilitates number judgments in monkeys, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 102 no. 45 (2005), pp. 16507–16511.
3. Brannon, E.M., The Development of Ordinal Numerical Knowledge in Infancy, Cognition, vol. 83 (2002), pp. 223-240.
4. Roitman, J., Brannon. E.M. & Platt, M.L., Monotonic Coding of Numerosity in Macaque, PLoS Biology, vol. 5 no. 8 (2007).
5. Cantlon, J.F. & Brannon, E.M., Basic math in monkeys and college students, PLoS Biology, vol. 5 no. 12 (2007), pp. e328.
6. Cordes, S., Brannon, E.M, The difficulties of representing continuous extent in infancy: representing number is just easier., Child Development (in press).
7. Brannon, E.M., The representation of numerical magnitude, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 16 (2006), pp. 222-229.