Reading, writing, and arithmetic skills are key cultural techniques in most societies. These academic skills must be acquired at a symbolic level – that is, enable us to produce and comprehend text and to perform more than very basic numerical operations, judgements, and calculations. These skills must be taught and learnt. During this procedural learning process (Nicolson and Fawcett 2007; Nicolson and Fawcett 2018), pre-existing functions – amongst them visual, auditory, memory, language, spatial, or quantity processing – are modified and coordinated to form novel cognitive procedures (Lachmann 2002; Lachmann 2008; Lachmann 2018; Lachmann and van Leeuwen 2014) which are then automatized after prolonged intensive training (Froyen et al. 2009; Lachmann and Van Leeuwen 2008; Barrouillet and Fayol 1998).