Brain, Behavior, and Learning Lab

Inégalités scolaires: a new book bridging sociology and cognitive psychology

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Educational inequalities are unusually pronounced in France, and few subjects are debated more fiercely. Why do some pupils acquire fundamental skills more easily than others? Why do gaps in achievement persist despite public policies designed to reduce them? And do these gaps stem above all from the school, the family, the individual characteristics of pupils, or from the interaction between them?

Inégalités scolaires: approche croisée entre sociologie et psychologie cognitive, which we have co-edited with Cléa Girard and Stanislas Morel, takes an unusual approach to these questions. Rather than juxtaposing disciplinary perspectives, each chapter is co-written by a sociologist and a cognitive psychologist working together, so that the complementarities between the two fields become visible.

The contributions explore the interactions between family environment, cognitive development, teaching practices and school learning. Individual chapters address the construction of academic skills, shared reading, behavioural genetics, preschool education, difficulties in learning to read, and dyslexia.

The book grew out of the international seminar series on educational inequalities that we have been co-organising with Stanislas Morel, which has brought sociologists and cognitive scientists into the same room since 2022.

The book is written in French and will be published by the Presses Universitaires de Lyon on 24 September 2026.

More information from the publisher

A day in the life of a person with dyscalculia: a series of games

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dyscalculia is a learning disorder affecting numbers and mathematics, and it concerns roughly 5 to 10% of children worldwide. People with dyscalculia may struggle to grasp the concept of number and the relations between numbers, to memorize arithmetic facts, to carry out calculations, and to handle everyday situations involving numbers.

To help people understand what that actually feels like, our team has designed a series of six short games that follow a single day, from waking up to the afternoon snack. Each one turns an ordinary daily activity into the kind of effortful puzzle that numbers can become for someone with dyscalculia:

Waking up — the clock game
Getting dressed — the sock game
Breakfast — mystery words
Leaving for school — find your way
A day at school — the battle game
Snack time — the coin game

Each game comes with two pages of instructions: one for parents, explaining the rules and why the game is relevant to dyscalculia, and one for children, setting out the key points.

An important caveat, which we state in the booklet itself: people with dyscalculia do not literally perceive the world the way these games depict it. The games are meant to illustrate the additional mental effort required to make sense of certain mathematical concepts, not to simulate the disorder.

The booklet was created by members of the Brain, Behavior and Learning team at the CRNL — Lise Viallet, Aurélie Lafaix, Charlotte Constant-Varlet, Jérôme Prado, Honorine Bouchet and Tatum Holley.

Download the games (PDF, in French)

The lab at MCLS 2026 in Padua

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Members of the lab travelled to Padua in June for the annual meeting of the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society (MCLS).

Charlotte Constant-Varlet and Morgane Papillon each presented their doctoral research as posters.

Jérôme Prado gave a talk together with Catherine Thevenot (University of Lausanne) introducing the automatized counting theory of mental arithmetic (the proposal that children’s arithmetic fluency emerges through the progressive automatization of counting procedures rather than through the retrieval of memorized facts alone). The theory is set out in full in a recent paper in Developmental Review: Counting on automatization: The automatized counting theory of mental arithmetic.

Counting on automatization: The automatized counting theory of mental arithmetic

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Developmental changes in similarity between neural representations of mental arithmetic and artificial neural networks

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Evaluating portable EEG: a comparison between two wireless systems (EPOC Flex and LiveAmp) and the wired BrainAmp system

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How are grammatical and arithmetic processing related in the brain? An ALE meta-analysis

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Patterns of solution times for simple addition problems in 12-year-old children are not compatible with retrieval models: A rebuttal to Andras and Macizo (2025)

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reasoning does hurt: Deliberation is associated with heightened levels of doubt

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Early NUmerical DIdactical Test (ENUDIT): A French-language monitoring test to assess early numerical abilities of children from 3 to 6

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The impact of frowning and doubt on deductive reasoning

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Early Montessori education shows delayed benefits for mathematical problem-solving in a 5-year longitudinal randomized controlled trial

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Familial transmission of neural representations for mental arithmetic across two generations

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From social inhibition in childhood to social facilitation in adulthood: How social presence systematically enhances the predominant response strategy in cognitive tasks

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How do theory of mind and formal language skills impact metaphoric reference comprehension during children's school-age years

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Individual differences in executive functions and theory of mind mediate the relation between academic skills from kindergarten to 5th grade

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reading comprehension resiliency in adolescents with and without dyslexia relates to vocabulary, listening comprehension and socioeconomic status

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reconceptualizing Metacognitive Experience in Dual-Process Reasoning: The Role of Emotion in Triggering Deliberation

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Assessing theory of mind in children: a tablet-based adaptation of a classic picture sequencing task

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Encoding models for developmental cognitive computational neuroscience: Promise, challenges, and potential

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fraction knowledge in adults with persistent mathematics difficulties

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

From brain to education through machine learning: Predicting literacy and numeracy skills from neuroimaging data

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Intergenerational transmission of brain structure and function in humans: A narrative review of designs, methods, and findings

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Spatial attention in mental arithmetic: A literature review and meta-analysis

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Arithmetic skills are associated with left fronto-temporal grey matter volume in 536 children and adolescents

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cortical representations of numbers and non-symbolic quantities expand and segregate in children from 5 to 8 years of age

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Developmental Trajectory of Anticipation: Insights from Sequential Comparative Judgments

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Impact of a game-based intervention on fraction learning for fifth-grade students: A pre-registered randomized controlled study

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Neural evidence for procedural automatization during cognitive development: Intraparietal response to changes in very-small addition problem-size increases with age

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Task-independent neural bases of peer presence effect on cognition in children and adults

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The development of simple addition problem solving in children: Reliance on automatized counting or memory retrieval depends on both expertise and problem size

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

To what extent do home numeracy practices and parental number talk relate to children's math skills? A pre-registered study in 5-year-old children

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

People

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Neural representations of absolute and relative magnitudes in symbolic and non-symbolic formats

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying multiplication and subtraction performance in adults and skill development in children: a scoping review

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Nurturing the mathematical brain: Home numeracy practices are associated with children's neural responses to Arabic numerals

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Prior home learning environment is associated with adaptation to homeschooling during COVID lockdown

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Quels sont les liens entre les compétences en mathématiques des enfants et leur environnement familial d'apprentissage ? Une revue de la littérature

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Relational reasoning in mathematical development: Neuro-cognitive foundations and implications for the classroom

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Comment la didactique des mathématiques peut-elle informer l'étude de la cognition numérique ? L'exemple d'une étude collaborative autour de la pédagogie Montessori à l'école maternelle

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Effects of Montessori education on the academic, cognitive, and social development of disadvantaged preschoolers: A randomized controlled study in the French public-school system

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Neurocognitive basis of deductive reasoning in children varies with parental education

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Nurturing the reading brain: Home literacy practices are associated with children's neural response to printed words through vocabulary skills

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Peer presence effect on numerosity and phonological comparisons in 4th graders: When working with a schoolmate makes children more adult-like

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Priming effects of arithmetic signs in 10- to 15-year-old children

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The relation between home numeracy practices and a variety of math skills in elementary school children

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A neuroimaging dataset of deductive reasoning in school-aged children

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Exploring MLD in mathematics education: Ten years of research

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Learning to run the number line: The development of attentional shifts during single-digit arithmetic

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Neural representations of transitive relations predict current and future math calculation skills in children

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The neural bases of argumentative reasoning

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The ratio processing system and its role in fraction understanding: Evidence from a match-to-sample task in children and adults with and without dyscalculia

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Si la dyscalculie m'était contée

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Aux racines de la cognition mathématique : comment les quantités numériques sont liées à l'espace dans l'esprit humain