Brian Butterworth
Encyclopedia
Brian Butterworth is a professor of cognitive neuropsychology
in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London
. His research has ranged from speech error
s and pauses, short-term memory
deficits, dyslexia
, reading
both in alphabetic scripts
and logogram
s, and mathematics
and dyscalculia
. His book The Mathematical Brain has been translated into four languages. He was Editor-in-Chief of Linguistics
(1978–1983) and a founding editor of the journals, "Language and Cognitive Processes" and "Mathematical Cognition". He is a Fellow of the British Academy
.
In 1984 he diagnosed President Ronald Reagan
on the basis of speech errors in his presidential re-election
speeches in an article in the Sunday Times as having Alzheimer’s disease ten years before this was formally identified. He was a coauthor in 1971 of a pamphet, Marked for life, critical of university
examinations.
He designed the world’s largest mathematical experiment involving over 18,000 people at Explore-At-Bristol
. The results were announced in Sept 2003 and found that women
were faster at subitizing. With Storm Thorgerson
, Butterworth created the “From Babble to Babel” 2000 exhibit at the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome
.
. Collections of four or below are usually subitized with collections of larger numbers being counted. Brian Butterworth designed an experiment that ran as an interactive exhibit at the Explore-At-Bristol
science museum
to find whether subitizing differed between women and men. Participants were asked to estimate as fast as they could between one and 10 dots and press the answer on a touch screen. How long they took—their reaction time--was measured. Over 18,000 people took part—the largest number ever to take part in a mathematical cognition experiment. He announced his finding that women were better than men at subitizing at the British Association for the Advancement of Science
's 2003 annual science festival
. He also found that people were six per cent faster on calculating the number of dots if they were presented on the left side of the screen (and so right sided lateralized
in the brain) but only if there were five or more and so counted.
Published in the same year in the US as What Counts New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0684854175
Butterworth B. (1980). Language Production Volume 1: Speech and talk Academic Pr ISBN 978-0121475017
Butterworth B. (1983). Language Production Volume 2: Development, Writing and Other Language Processes Academic Pr ISBN 978-0121475024
Butterworth B. Comrie B. Dahl O. (1984). Explanations for Language Universals Mouton De Gruyter ISBN 978-3110097979
Butterworth, B. (2004). Dyscalculia Guidance Helping Pupils with Specific Learning Difficulties in Maths. David Fulton ISBN 978-0708711521
Cognitive neuropsychology
Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. It places a particular emphasis on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness with a view to...
in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
. His research has ranged from speech error
Speech error
Speech errors, commonly referred to as slips of the tongue , are conscious or unconscious deviations from the apparently intended form of an utterance. They can be subdivided into spontaneously and inadvertently produced speech errors and intentionally produced word-plays or puns...
s and pauses, short-term memory
Short-term memory
Short-term memory is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time. The duration of short-term memory is believed to be in the order of seconds. A commonly cited capacity is 7 ± 2 elements...
deficits, dyslexia
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...
, reading
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
both in alphabetic scripts
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
and logogram
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s, and mathematics
Mathematical psychology
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior...
and dyscalculia
Dyscalculia
Dyscalculia is a specific learning disability involving innate difficulty in learning or comprehending simple arithmetic. It is akin to dyslexia and includes difficulty in understanding numbers, learning how to manipulate numbers, learning maths facts, and a number of other related symptoms...
. His book The Mathematical Brain has been translated into four languages. He was Editor-in-Chief of Linguistics
Linguistics (journal)
According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2010 impact factor of 0.557, ranking it 74th out of 144 journals in the category "Linguistics"....
(1978–1983) and a founding editor of the journals, "Language and Cognitive Processes" and "Mathematical Cognition". He is a Fellow of the British Academy
British Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national body for the humanities and the social sciences. Its purpose is to inspire, recognise and support excellence in the humanities and social sciences, throughout the UK and internationally, and to champion their role and value.It receives an annual...
.
In 1984 he diagnosed President Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
on the basis of speech errors in his presidential re-election
United States presidential election, 1984
The United States presidential election of 1984 was a contest between the incumbent President Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate, and former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate. Reagan was helped by a strong economic recovery from the deep recession of 1981–1982...
speeches in an article in the Sunday Times as having Alzheimer’s disease ten years before this was formally identified. He was a coauthor in 1971 of a pamphet, Marked for life, critical of university
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
examinations.
He designed the world’s largest mathematical experiment involving over 18,000 people at Explore-At-Bristol
At-Bristol
At-Bristol is a public science and technology "exploration" and education centre and charity in Bristol, England.As a visitor attraction, At-Bristol has hundreds of hands-on exhibits, and a Planetarium with seasonal shows for the over fives, and a 'Little Stars' show for children aged five and under...
. The results were announced in Sept 2003 and found that women
Gender differences
A sex difference is a distinction of biological and/or physiological characteristics associated with either males or females of a species. These can be of several types, including direct and indirect. Direct being the direct result of differences prescribed by the Y-chromosome, and indirect being...
were faster at subitizing. With Storm Thorgerson
Storm Thorgerson
Storm Thorgerson is an English graphic designer, known for his work for rock bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, 10cc, Dream Theater, The Mars Volta, Muse, The Cranberries, and Biffy Clyro.-Biography:...
, Butterworth created the “From Babble to Babel” 2000 exhibit at the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome
Millennium Dome
The Millennium Dome, colloquially referred to simply as The Dome or even The O2 Arena, is the original name of a large dome-shaped building, originally used to house the Millennium Experience, a major exhibition celebrating the beginning of the third millennium...
.
Subitizing experiment
Subitizing concerns the ability to instantly identify the number of items without countingCounting
Counting is the action of finding the number of elements of a finite set of objects. The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a counter by a unit for every element of the set, in some order, while marking those elements to avoid visiting the same element more than once,...
. Collections of four or below are usually subitized with collections of larger numbers being counted. Brian Butterworth designed an experiment that ran as an interactive exhibit at the Explore-At-Bristol
At-Bristol
At-Bristol is a public science and technology "exploration" and education centre and charity in Bristol, England.As a visitor attraction, At-Bristol has hundreds of hands-on exhibits, and a Planetarium with seasonal shows for the over fives, and a 'Little Stars' show for children aged five and under...
science museum
Science museum
A science museum or a science centre is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in museology have broadened the range of...
to find whether subitizing differed between women and men. Participants were asked to estimate as fast as they could between one and 10 dots and press the answer on a touch screen. How long they took—their reaction time--was measured. Over 18,000 people took part—the largest number ever to take part in a mathematical cognition experiment. He announced his finding that women were better than men at subitizing at the British Association for the Advancement of Science
British Association for the Advancement of Science
frame|right|"The BA" logoThe British Association for the Advancement of Science or the British Science Association, formerly known as the BA, is a learned society with the object of promoting science, directing general attention to scientific matters, and facilitating interaction between...
's 2003 annual science festival
Science festival
A science festival is a public event featuring a variety of science- and technology-related activities—from lectures, exhibitions, workshops, live demonstrations of experiments, guided tours and panel discussions to cultural events such as theater plays, readings and musical productions, all with...
. He also found that people were six per cent faster on calculating the number of dots if they were presented on the left side of the screen (and so right sided lateralized
Lateralization of brain function
A longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres, connected by the corpus callosum. The sides resemble each other and each hemisphere's structure is generally mirrored by the other side. Yet despite the strong anatomical similarities, the functions of each...
in the brain) but only if there were five or more and so counted.
The Mathematical Brain
(1999). London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0333766101Published in the same year in the US as What Counts New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0684854175
-
- Italian translation. Intelligenza Matematica. (1999). Milano: Rizzoli. ISBN 9788873780137
- Japanese translation (Naze sugaku ga tokui na hito to nigate na hito ga irunoka? (Why are some people good, but others bad at maths?) (2001). Tokyo: Shufunotomosha.
- Swedish translation Den matematiska människan. (2000). Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand. ISBN 9789146174066
- Chinese translation (2004). 200X Orient Publishing Company (Chinese)
Other books
Powell A. Butterworth B. (1971). Marked for life: a criticism of assessment at universities. London, Anarchist Group ISBN 9780901807014Butterworth B. (1980). Language Production Volume 1: Speech and talk Academic Pr ISBN 978-0121475017
Butterworth B. (1983). Language Production Volume 2: Development, Writing and Other Language Processes Academic Pr ISBN 978-0121475024
Butterworth B. Comrie B. Dahl O. (1984). Explanations for Language Universals Mouton De Gruyter ISBN 978-3110097979
Butterworth, B. (2004). Dyscalculia Guidance Helping Pupils with Specific Learning Difficulties in Maths. David Fulton ISBN 978-0708711521
Speech
- Butterworth B. (1975). Hesitation and Semantic Planning in speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 4: 75 - 87.
- Butterworth B. (1979). Hesitation and the Production of Verbal Paraphasias and Neologisms in Jargon Aphasia. Brain and Language, 8, 133 - 161.
- Butterworth B. (1981). Speech errors: old data in search of new theories. (pp. 627 – 662). In A. Cutler (ed.) Slips of the Tongue and Language Production: Berlin: Mouton.
- Butterworth B. (1983). Introduction: A Brief Review of Methods of Studying Language Production. (pp. 1 – 17). In B. Butterworth, B. Comrie and Ö Dahl (eds.) Explanations for Language Universals: Berlin: Mouton.
- Butterworth B, Howard D, Mcloughlin P. (1984). The semantic deficit in aphasia: the relationship between semantic errors in auditory comprehension and picture naming. Neuropsychologia 22(4):409-26.
- Butterworth B, Howard D. (1987). Paragrammatisms. Cognition. 26(1):1-37.
- Butterworth B. (1992). Disorders of phonological encoding. Cognition. 42(1-3):261-86.
- Butterworth B. (1994). Disorders of sentence production. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 346(1315):55-61.
Memory
- Shallice T, Butterworth B. (1977). Short-term memory impairment and spontaneous speech. Neuropsychologia. 15(6):729-35.
- Butterworth B, Campbell R, Howard D. (1986). The uses of short-term memory: a case study. Q J Exp Psychol A. 38(4):705-37.
Reading and dyslexia
- Campbell R, Butterworth B. (1985). Phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia in a highly literate subject: a developmental case with associated deficits of phonemic processing and awareness. Q J Exp Psychol A. 37(3):435-75.
- Yin, W. G. & Butterworth, B. (1998) Chinese pure alexia. Aphasiology, 12, 65-76.
- Wydell TN, Butterworth B. (1999). A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia. Cognition. 70(3):273-305.
- Butterworth B, Yin WG. (1991). The universality of two routines for reading: evidence from Chinese dyslexia. Proc Biol Sci. 246(1315):91-5.
- Yin W. Butterworth B. (1992). Deep and Surface Dyslexia in Chinese In Chen, H-C. & Tzeng, O. J. L. (eds.) Language Processing in Chinese. Amsterdam: North Holland/Elsevier. (1 MB)
- Shibahara N, Zorzi M, Hill MP, Wydell T, Butterworth B. (2003). Semantic effects in word naming: evidence from English and Japanese Kanji. Q J Exp Psychol A. 56(2):263-86.
Mathematics
- Cipolotti L, Warrington EK, Butterworth B. (1995). Selective impairment in manipulating Arabic numerals. Cortex. 31(1):73-86.
- Butterworth B. (2001). What makes a prodigy? Nat Neurosci. Jan;4(1):11-2.
- Butterworth B, Cappelletti M, Kopelman M. (2001). Category specificity in reading and writing: the case of number words. Nat Neurosci. Aug;4(8):784-6.
- Piazza M, Mechelli A, Butterworth B, Price CJ. (2002). Are subitizing and counting implemented as separate or functionally overlapping processes? Neuroimage. 15(2):435-46.
- Landerl K, Bevan A, Butterworth B. (2004). Developmental dyscalculia and basic numerical capacities: a study of 8-9-year-old students. Cognition. 93(2):99-125.
- Gelman R, Butterworth B. (2005). Number and language: how are they related? Trends Cogn Sci. 9(1):6-10.
- Butterworth B. (2005). The development of arithmetical abilities. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 46(1):3-18.
External links
- Mathematical Brain Brian Butterworth’s website