Research Interests for Elizabeth M. Brannon

Research Interests: Development and Evolution of Numerical Abilities

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
  1. Jordan, K.E. MacLean, E., & Brannon, E.M., Monkeys tally and match quantities across senses, Cognition, vol. 108 (2008), pp. 617-625.
  2. Brannon, E.M., Libertus, M. Meck, W.H., Woldorff, M., Electrophysiological Measures of Time Processing in, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 20 no. 2 (2008), pp. 192-203.
  3. Cordes, S., Brannon, E.M, The difficulties of representing continuous extent in infancy: representing 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, PLoS Biology, vol. 5 no. 8 (2007).
  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., Notation-independent number processing in the intraparietal sulcus in adults and young children., PLOS Biology, vol. 4 no. 5 (2006), pp. 1-11.