TY - JOUR
T1 - Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) spontaneously compute addition operations over large numbers
AU - Flombaum, Jonathan I.
AU - Junge, Justin A.
AU - Hauser, Marc D.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to Elizabeth Spelke, Susan Carey, and Laurie Santos for their comments on earlier drafts, as well as Teddy Jones, Alex Rosati, and Virginia Vance for help with data collection, and Melissa Gerald for help securing the Cayo Santiago field site. The authors would also like to thank Stan Dehaene and two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments. JIF was generously supported by the Harvard College Research Program, the Harvard Interfaculty Initiative in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, and an NSF predoctoral fellowship. MDH was supported by an NSF ROLE grant. The Cayo Santiago Field Station is supported by the NIH (NCCR grant CM-5-P40RR003640-13) and the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus.
PY - 2005/10
Y1 - 2005/10
N2 - Mathematics is a uniquely human capacity. Studies of animals and human infants reveal, however, that this capacity builds on language-independent mechanisms for quantifying small numbers (<4) precisely and large numbers approximately. It is unclear whether animals and human infants can spontaneously tap mechanisms for quantifying large numbers to compute mathematical operations. Moreover, all available work on addition operations in non-human animals has confounded number with continuous perceptual properties (e.g. volume, contour length) that correlate with number. This study shows that rhesus monkeys spontaneously compute addition operations over large numbers, as opposed to continuous extents, and that the limit on this ability is set by the ratio difference between two numbers as opposed to their absolute difference.
AB - Mathematics is a uniquely human capacity. Studies of animals and human infants reveal, however, that this capacity builds on language-independent mechanisms for quantifying small numbers (<4) precisely and large numbers approximately. It is unclear whether animals and human infants can spontaneously tap mechanisms for quantifying large numbers to compute mathematical operations. Moreover, all available work on addition operations in non-human animals has confounded number with continuous perceptual properties (e.g. volume, contour length) that correlate with number. This study shows that rhesus monkeys spontaneously compute addition operations over large numbers, as opposed to continuous extents, and that the limit on this ability is set by the ratio difference between two numbers as opposed to their absolute difference.
KW - Compute addition operations
KW - Language-independent mechanisms
KW - Rhesus monkey
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=26844561387&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=26844561387&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.09.004
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.09.004
M3 - Article
C2 - 16260264
AN - SCOPUS:26844561387
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 97
SP - 315
EP - 325
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 3
ER -