title: Animal cognition. Number-space mapping in the newborn chick resembles humans' mental number line.
abstract: Humans represent numbers along a mental number line (MNL), where smaller values are located on the left and larger on the right. The origin of the MNL and its connections with cultural experience are unclear: Pre-verbal infants and nonhuman species master a variety of numerical abilities, supporting the existence of evolutionary ancient precursor systems. In our experiments, 3-day-old domestic chicks, once familiarized with a target number (5), spontaneously associated a smaller number (2) with the left space and a larger number (8) with the right space. The same number (8), though, was associated with the left space when the target number was 20. Similarly to humans, chicks associate smaller numbers with the left space and larger numbers with the right space.
authors: Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy. Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto (Trento), Italy. rosa.rugani@unipd.it.
authors: Rosa
authors: R
authors: Rugani
authors: Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto (Trento), Italy.
authors: Giorgio
authors: G
authors: Vallortigara
authors: Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
authors: Konstantinos
authors: K
authors: Priftis
authors: Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
authors: Lucia
authors: L
authors: Regolin
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000831:Animals, Newborn; D002645:Chickens / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D055641:Mathematical Concepts; D008606:Mental Processes; D065855:Spatial Processing