Abstract: Numbers as one of the most important culture inventions are being paid more and more attention by cognitive neuroscientists now, who are focusing on the puzzle that what on earth is the cerebral basis of the human competence for mathematics. Neuroimaging studies have indicated a network of brain regions, including the parietal cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and cerebellum, as being involved in arithmetic processing. Experiment evidences demonstrated that the human brain contains an analogical representation of numerical quantities, in which numerical quantities are internally manipulated as points on the mental “number line”. Neuropsychological studies of number processing indicated that this representation is distributed in the two hemispheres and its dominant site points to inferior parietal cortex.

Key words: number processing, ERP (event-related potential), inferior parietal lobe