Skip to main content

Eric D. Wilkey

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Human Development

Eric Wilkey is an assistant professor of psychology and human development whose research focuses on educational neuroscience, primarily in the development of mathematical skills and neurocognitive mechanisms that enable this type of cognition. Wilkey is excited by his line of research because so little is known about the brain that new research often challenges long-held assumptions about how people think and develop.

Wilkey decided to come to Vanderbilt because of the institution’s commitment to interdisciplinary research. Vanderbilt was the first institution to offer a Ph.D. program in educational neuroscience and continues to be a leader in this field. The education research and depth of expertise in mathematics development at Peabody also attracted him to Vanderbilt.

Wilkey recently served as assistant professor of psychology and of computation and technology at Louisiana State University. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Vanderbilt in 2018, his M.Ed. in mind, brain and education from Harvard University in 2011 and his B.A. in philosophy from Belmont University in 2007.

Lab Website

Representative Publications

Wilkey, E. D., Shanley, L., Sabb, F., Ansari, D., Cohen, J. C., Men, V., Heller, N. A., & Clarke, B. (2022). Sharpening, focusing, and developing: A study of change in nonsymbolic number comparison skills and math achievement in 1st grade. Developmental Science, 25(3), e13194. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13194

Pollack, C., Wilkey, E. D., & Price, G. R. (2022). Predictors of Middle School Students’ Growth in Symbolic Number Comparison Performance. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 8(1), 53–72. https://doi.org/10.5964/jnc.8069

Lau, T. T., Wilkey, E. D., Soltanlou, M., Lagacé-Cusiac, R., Peters, L., Tremblay, P., Goffin, C., Starling Alves, I., Ribner, A. D., Thompson, C., Van Hoof, J., Bahnmueller, J., Alvarez, A., Bellon, E., Coolen, I., Ollivier, F., Ansari, D. (2022) Numeracy and COVID-19: examining interrelationships between numeracy, health numeracy and behaviour. Project page: https://osf.io/qpdnt/

Lynn, A., Wilkey, E. D., & Price, G. R. (2021). Predicting Children’s Math Skills from Task-Based and Resting-State Functional Brain Connectivity. Cerebral Cortex, 1–11, epub ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab476

Wilkey, E. D., & Ansari, D. (2020). Challenging the neurobiological link between number sense and symbolic numerical abilities. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14225

Wilkey, E. D., Conrad, B. N., Yeo, D. J. & Price, G. R. (2020). Shared Numerosity Representations Across Formats and Tasks Revealed with 7 Tesla fMRI: Decoding, Generalization, and Individual Differences in Behavior. Cerebral Cortex Communications. https://doi.org/10.1093/texcom/tgaa038

Conrad, B. N., Wilkey, E. D., Yeo, D. J. & Price, G. R. (2020). Network topology of symbolic and nonsymbolic number comparison. Network Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00144

Wilkey, E.D., Pollack, C., Price, G. R. (2020). Dyscalculia and typical math achievement are associated with individual differences in number specific executive function. Child Development. , 91(2), 596-619. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13194