"Numbers are abstract concepts, but our brains have ways of organizing them that allow us to compare and reason about their values," said study co-authors Daniela Valério, a postdoctoral researcher in the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit (UNICOG) in France, and Stanislas Dehaene, the director of UNICOG.
That system is a map for both sets of numerical values within the brain, they reported Thursday (Oct. 22) in the journal PLOS Biology.
The brain scans revealed distinct activity patterns in the anterior inferior parietal cortex — part of the brain that's known to be key for processing numbers. As participants compared numerical values, the brain region lit up in an organized pattern resembling a number line. The whole numbers and fractions were represented along this shared line according to their size, rather than being mapped in separate systems.
fMRI scans performed during the study revealed similar patterns of brain activity when participants compared integers and fractions. Smaller numbers are represented in reddish hues and larger numbers in bluish hues; these activity patterns represent an average across the study participants. (Image credit: Valério D, et al., 2026, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 )"For me, it is how the brain gets from a symbol to its meaning," said Abiot Derbie, a cognitive neuroscientist and founder of the company LifeByLogic, which makes psychology assessments.
The idea that the brain represents numerical magnitude in the parietal lobe is not novel. However, scientists mostly understood how the brain dealt with whole numbers, while its strategy for fractions was not well understood. The new work builds on that existing research by exploring how both numerical magnitude and number type are processed together.
From previous work, "scientists already knew that fractions and whole numbers engage overlapping parts of the brain's number-processing network," Derbie said. "This study gives us a clearer picture of how their values are organized."
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In the current study, the participants found it more difficult to compare fractions than to compare whole numbers, the researchers noted; they were slower and made more errors while working with fractions, which was expected. But the study's results don't offer hints as to why.
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