New and Exciting in PLoS Biology

Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students:

Adult humans possess mathematical abilities that are unmatched by any other member of the animal kingdom. Yet, there is increasing evidence that the ability to enumerate sets of objects nonverbally is a capacity that humans share with other animal species. That is, like humans, nonhuman animals possess the ability to estimate and compare numerical values nonverbally. We asked whether humans and nonhuman animals also share a capacity for nonverbal arithmetic. We 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. Our results indicate that monkeys perform approximate mental addition in a manner that is remarkably similar to the performance of the college students. These findings support the argument that humans and nonhuman primates share a cognitive system for nonverbal arithmetic, which likely reflects an evolutionary link in their cognitive abilities.