{"id":209982,"date":"2017-01-16T09:55:33","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T14:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=209982"},"modified":"2017-01-26T15:59:30","modified_gmt":"2017-01-26T20:59:30","slug":"what-humans-and-primates-both-know-when-it-comes-to-numbers-209982","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/what-humans-and-primates-both-know-when-it-comes-to-numbers-209982\/","title":{"rendered":"What humans and primates both know when it comes to numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past several years, Jessica Cantlon has been working to understand how humans develop the concept of numbers, from simple counting to complex mathematical reasoning. Early in her career at the University of Rochester, the assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences<\/strong><\/a> began studying primates in her search for the origins of numeric understanding.<\/p>\n

In 2013, she, PhD candidate Steve Ferrigno, and colleagues at Rochester and the Seneca Park Zoo made a surprising discovery: in an experiment using varying quantities of peanuts, baboons (even as young as one year of age) clearly showed an ability to distinguish between large and small quantities of objects.<\/p>\n

But the finding raised another question. To what extent might that ability be influenced by other dimensions of those objects\u2014such as their relative surface area\u2014in addition to their number?<\/p>\n

This month Cantlon, Ferrigno, and two additional coauthors\u2014Steven Piantadosi, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester, and Julian Jara-Ettinger, a postdoctoral researcher in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT\u2014are publishing the results of a new study suggesting that primates do, in fact, have the ability to distinguish large and small quantities of objects, irrespective of the surface area they appear to occupy.<\/p>\n