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Asked to picture the numbers from one to 10, most people will imagine a straight line with one at the left end and 10 at the right.
This “mental number line,” as researchers have termed it, is so pervasive that some scientists have argued that the spatial representation of numbers is hard-wired into the brain, part of a primitive number system that underlies humans’ capacity for higher mathematics.
Now a team of Italian researchers has found that newborn chicks, like humans, appear to map numbers spatially, associating smaller amounts with the left side and larger amounts with the right side.
The chicks, trained to seek out mealworms behind white plastic panels printed with varying numbers of identical red squares, repeatedly demonstrated a preference for the left when the number of squares was small and for the right when the number was larger. The research, led by Rosa Rugani, a psychologist who at the time was at the University of Padova, will appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
www.nytimes.com
This “mental number line,” as researchers have termed it, is so pervasive that some scientists have argued that the spatial representation of numbers is hard-wired into the brain, part of a primitive number system that underlies humans’ capacity for higher mathematics.
Now a team of Italian researchers has found that newborn chicks, like humans, appear to map numbers spatially, associating smaller amounts with the left side and larger amounts with the right side.
The chicks, trained to seek out mealworms behind white plastic panels printed with varying numbers of identical red squares, repeatedly demonstrated a preference for the left when the number of squares was small and for the right when the number was larger. The research, led by Rosa Rugani, a psychologist who at the time was at the University of Padova, will appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
Chickens Agree: Left Means Less; Right Means More (Published 2015)
Scientists found that newborn chicks, like people, seem to map numbers spatially, associating smaller amounts with the left and larger ones with the right.
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