Endorsing narratives of white replacement: Elite discourse, public attention, and extremist mobilization.

Arithmetic skills are acquired in school and are later important for everyday life. Hence, it is essential to better understand the underlying mechanisms of these skills not only in children, who have just learnt these skills, and in adults, whose arithmetic skills are well established, but also in older adults, because deficits in these skills have a detrimental impact on independent living. Therefore, the current study sets out to investigate the behavioral and neural correlates of arithmetic across the lifespan. Arithmetic is represented in a fronto-parietal network in the brain [], for meta-analyses in children and adults see [], for a review in children see [], for a model and its extensions in adults see [, ], but the extent of frontal and parietal activation in this network changes during development. From childhood to adulthood, frontal activation in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) decreases, while parietal activation in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and angular gyrus (AG) increases [–]. The brain areas in this fronto-parietal network fulfill different functions during mental arithmetic [,]: Activation of the IFG and MFG is mainly associated with domain-general processes, such as working memory required for arithmetic; however, the exact location in the prefrontal cortex depends on the specific task demands []. Activation of the IPS, located at the border between the superior parietal lobule (SPL) and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), reflects domain-specific number magnitude processing, and thus, an age-related activation increase indicates functional specialization []. Less deactivation of the SMG and AG (constituting the IPL) is specific for arithmetic fact retrieval, i.e., the automatic mapping of single-digit arithmetic problems to their solutions []. Altogether, there is evidence for a gradual developmental shift from domain-general frontal activation towards more specific parietal activation within the fronto-parietal network of arithmetic [,] when comparing children and adults. Moreover, the question arises as to how these developmental changes progress during aging. With increasing age, general cognitive capacities decline [,]. Cognitive processing in older adults is especially limited by decreased working memory capacity and processing speed. Although some numerical abilities are affected by age-related changes, arithmetic skills are known to be mainly preserved in older adults [, , for a review see 18]. For instance, arithmetic fact knowledge and automated counting procedures in the single-digit range were shown to be equal or even superior to younger adults [,]. Since neuroimaging research on arithmetic in older adults has never been conducted so far, this project on the behavioral and neural correlates of arithmetic during development across the whole lifespan opens a new research field in numerical cognition. The investigation of the mechanisms underlying arithmetic in the elderly brain will provide insights into whether the gradual developmental fronto-parietal shift continues during aging, and whether arithmetic is preserved during aging or shows deficits due to the general cognitive decline, thus requiring compensation.