What is a Computation?

In this talk we shall look at the question what a computation is from a theoretical and a neuropsychological perspective. Over the centuries different calculi have been invented to formalise reasoning procedures in order to calculate the answer to a problem, which can involve various data types, i.e., a+b or 1+7. The question of how the data type in mathematical reasoning influences the processing at the neural level is not well understood, although it is core, in particular also at the language-mathematics interface, as e.g. for numerals systems. We shall present the results of different fMRI experiments we performed addressing the question of data type specificity.