Monkeys have the ability to perform mental arithmetic, and they equal the performance of college students given the same test, researchers at Duke University have demonstrated.
The findings shed light on the shared evolutionary origins of arithmetic ability in humans and non-human animals, according to Assistant Professor Elizabeth Brannon, Ph.D. and Jessica Cantlon, Ph.D., of the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
Adult humans possess mathematical abilities that are unmatched by any other member of the animal kingdom, but there is increasing evidence that the ability to count sets of objects nonverbally is a capacity that humans share with other animal species.
"We know that animals can recognize quantities, but there is less evidence for their ability to carry out explicit mathematical tasks, such as addition," said graduate student Jessica Cantlon. "Our study shows that they can."
The researchers tested monkeys and college students on a nonverbal arithmetic task in which they had to add the numerical values of two sets of dots together and choose a stimulus from two options that reflected the arithmetic sum of the two sets.
The results indicate that monkeys perform approximate mental addition in a manner that is remarkably similar to the performance of the college students.
That monkeys and humans share the ability to add suggests that basic arithmetic may be part of our shared evolutionary past.
Humans have added language and writing to their repertoire, which undoubtedly changes the way we represent numbers.
"Much of adult humans' mathematical capacity lies in their ability to represent numerical concepts using symbolic language. A monkey can't tell the difference between 2000 and 2001 objects, for instance," Brannon said. "However, our work has shown that both humans and monkeys can mentally manipulate representations of number to generate approximate sums of individual objects."
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