Monkeys Perform Arithmetic As Well As College Students
December 20th, 2007 Posted by: Dr. Cox
(Ivanhoe Newswire) â When it comes to nonverbal arithmetic, a new study shows that monkeys can hold their own against college students.
A study appearing in the open-access Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology, researchers Elizabeth Brannon and Jessica Cantlon set out to discover if humans and nonhuman animals share a capacity for nonverbal arithmetic. They had monkeys and college students add the numerical value of two sets of dots and choose a stimulus from two options that reflected the answer. They found that monkeys perform approximate mental addition in a way that is remarkable similar to the way the college students perform the exercise.
The results add to the increasing evidence that the ability to count sets of objects nonverbally is a capacity that humans share with other animal species. It also supports the argument that humans and nonhuman primates share a cognitive system for nonverbal arithmetic, which is likely to reflect an evolutionary link in cognitive abilities.
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SOURCE: Open-Access Public Library of Science (PLoS Biol 5 (12) :e28