Keynote: Abstract Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s vision is a world in which everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge. One of the largest hindrances is the sheer number of languages Wikipedia needs to cover in order to achieve that goal. We want to tackle this problem with a multilingual Wikipedia allowing for content to be shared between language editions. We separate this goal into two parts: creating and maintaining content in an abstract notation within a project called Abstract Wikipedia, and creating a new project called Wikifunctions that can translate this notation to natural language.

The Neural Development of an Abstract Concept of Number

As literate adults, we appreciate numerical values as abstract entities that can be represented by a numeral, a word, a number of lines on a scorecard, or a sequence of chimes from a clock. This abstract, notation-independent appreciation of numbers develops gradually over the first several years of life. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examine the brain mechanisms that 6- and 7-year-old children and adults recruit to solve numerical comparisons across different notation systems. The data reveal that when young children compare numerical values in symbolic and nonsymbolic notations, they invoke the same network of brain regions as adults including occipito-temporal and parietal cortex. However, children also recruit inferior frontal cortex during these numerical tasks to a much greater degree than adults. Our data lend additional support to an emerging consensus from adult neuroimaging, nonhuman primate neurophysiology, and computational modeling studies that a core neural system integrates notation-independent numerical representations throughout development but, early in development, higher-order brain mechanisms mediate this process.