doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00410 Grounding magnitudes

Over the last few decades, different studies have been directed toward a better under-standing of how humans use perceptual information in order to estimate mag-nitudes. Converging data from different research domains indicate that the pro-cessing of time, space, and other quantities frequently unfold together in the human brain and cognition. The idea of a com-mon metric that regulates the ability to extract and manipulate information about quantities is best described by A Theory Of Magnitude (ATOM; Walsh, 2003; Bueti and Walsh, 2009). ATOM considers space, time, and numbers as represented in a generalized magnitude system based on a common code that is essential to imple-ment bodily actions. The underlying over-lap in the neuro-cognitive processing of magnitudes is mediated by a brain system that primarily involves the parietal and the prefrontal cortex (Bueti and Walsh