Context-dependent experiential grounding of ambiguous abstract mathematical words

Grounded cognition accounts posit that the quality and quantity of experience contribute to neural meaning representations, whereas the generalizability of the underlying mechanisms across abstract domains remains debated. Building on initial evidence, this fMRI study further investigated whether abstract mathematical concept processing is grounded in magnitude-related brain networks as a function of individual mathematical experience. Thirty-two healthy, young undergraduates up to post-doctoral researchers in mathematics-related fields performed association judgments in a novel disambiguation paradigm, wherein contextual cues shifted ambiguous abstract word processing towards a mathematical or non-mathematical meaning. Region-of-interest analyses showed that mathematical conceptual processing recruited a network involved in lower-level magnitude processing and whole-brain-analyses revealed additional recruitment of adjacent areas within a network associated with higher-level mathematical cognition. Within these networks, processing the contextually disambiguated mathematical meaning of the ambiguous abstract words showed spatially more restricted yet overlapping activations compared to the processing of the mathematical contextual cues, providing strong evidence for experiential grounding at the conceptual level after minimizing lexical confounds by using the same ambiguous words across contexts. Resting-state functional connectivity within the magnitude network was positively associated with the participants’ scores in a mathematical test. Unexpectedly, we found only tentative evidence for a modulation by performance- or usage-related interindividual experience measures in follow-up analyses. Overall, our results extend prior work on the experiential grounding of mathematical concepts and contribute to a growing effort to assess the generalizability of grounding mechanisms across abstract domains.