Monkeys equally capable as college students in doing math

Durham, North Carolina, February 14: Macaque monkeys and college students are equally capable of doing rough math or summing up objects without counting them. A Duke University expert discovered this amazing similarity between primates and humans while studying brain systems that support number sense.

Elizabeth Brannon, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, has been studying how primates, infants and human adults can think about numbers without using language.

Brannon, who is trying to determine the system that helps develop this cognitive skill, says, “Number is one of the more abstract domains of cognition: Three coins and three loaves of bread are very different concepts,” yet she says, “many studies show that babies, even in the first year of life, can tell the difference between quantities."

From her study she found that both human infants and macaque monkeys who were shown same number of objects in different sets repeatedly could easily point the odd quantity, or whenever there was a new number of objects.

Interestingly, on comparing college students and monkeys in summing up objects without counting or doing rough calculations, she found that both of them performed calculations with similar speed and accuracy.

She explained the reasons why the number sense is useful for primates in the wild, “In foraging situations, animals need to make decisions about how long to stay in a given patch of food and when to move on.

“Territorial animals may need to assess the number of individuals in their own group relative to competing groups to decide whether to stand their ground or retreat."

Brannon believes that knowing the science behind number sense can prove helpful to early childhood educators. "If the nonverbal number sense is really providing a critical foundation for math achievement, then this will suggest teaching methods that provide more grounding in the nonverbal quantity system," she said.