Piece of Evidence. Commentary: Ancestral Mental Number Lines: What Is the Evidence?

Frontiers in Psychology

Rosa Rugani¹ 

关键词: numerical cognition;    number sense;    domestic chick;    spatial numerical associations;    mental number line;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00553

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

In a recent comment, Núñez and Fias (2015) argued that our study (Rugani et al., 2015a) failed to demonstrate the existence of a linear numbers-space mapping. Defining the specific structure (straight vs. curve line, logarithmic vs. linear, 2D vs. 3D, hyperbolic or parabolic!) of chicks' (or newborn humans') number-space mapping was not the aim of our research (Rugani et al., 2015a). The aim of our study was, instead, to investigate the existence of spatial numerical associations in subjects without language or cultural experience (i.e., chicks), independently of the exact nature of this association. We found that 3-day-old domestic chicks associate small numbers with the left side of space and large numbers with the right one (Rugani et al., 2015a), excluding a role of language or culture on the original number-space association. Therefore, we claimed that number space mapping in chicks resembles the humans' Mental Number Line (MNL), a well-known description of the fact that adult humans associate small numbers with the left side and large numbers with the right side (Umiltà et al., 2009; Dehaene, 2011).

【 授权许可】

CC BY