Does the parietal cortex distinguish between "10," "ten," and ten dots?

It is well established that the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) plays an important role in the processing and representation of numerical magnitude. Two recent studies by Piazza et al. and Cohen Kadosh et al. published in this issue of Neuron used fMRI adaptation to explore the extent to which parietal number processing is dependent upon or independent of a numbers' surface format. Their results, while slightly different, converge to suggest that the answer may be neither, but rather that it depends on the hemisphere.