Origins of Spatial, Temporal, and Numerical Cognition: Insights from Comparative Psychology

doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-385948-8.00013-X

Space, Time and Number in the Brain

Searching for the Foundations of Mathematical Thought

2011, Pages 191-206

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This chapter explains how the careful selection of animal models provides exciting, novel perspectives on the development and evolution of human cognitive structure. This chapter also reviews evidence from spatial, temporal and numerical cognition, all three of which are foundational cognitive domains ensuring basic vertebrate experience. Competing theories have been formulated as to how animals and humans reorient themselves in these circumstances, which include Fodorian modular encapsulated computations of the shape of the extended surfaces layout, combination of environmental cues weighted according to their experienced reliability, image-matching processes operating on panoramic 2D projections of current and remembered environments. When the objects were similar, chicks chose the set of objects of larger numerosity, irrespective of the number of objects they had been reared with. Taxonomically informed cross-species comparisons within our immediate primate family, the great apes, offer a way to investigate the evolutionary history of late-blooming human cognitive skills. The power of phylogenetic inference depends on sample size and the completeness of the tested family of species.

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Citation Excerpt :
This pattern of results demonstrates not only that non-human primates can and do represent numerical concepts spatially, but that these representations are flexible and presumably influenced by external factors. Although these data support the view that SNAs have deep evolutionary foundations (see also Haun et al., 2011), it is clear that biological factors cannot fully account for the development of SNAs. While SNAs appear quite robustly across various tasks and populations, there is significant variation in the direction of these associations across cultures (for a review, see Göbel et al., 2011).
Mapping numbers onto space is a common cognitive representation that has been explored in both behavioral and neuroimaging contexts. Empirical work probing the diverse nature of these spatial-numerical associations (SNAs) has led researchers to question 1) how the human brain links numbers with space, and 2) whether this link is biologically vs. culturally determined. We review the existing literature on the development of SNAs and situate that empirical work within cognitive and neuroscientific theoretical frameworks. We propose that an evolutionarily-ancient frontal-parietal circuit broadly tuned to multiple magnitude dimensions provides the phylogenetic substrate for SNAs, while enculturation and sensorimotor experience shape their specific profiles. We then use this perspective to discuss educational implications and highlight promising avenues for future research.
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^*: Reprinted from Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol 14, Daniel B.M. Haun, Fiona M. Jordan, Giorgio Vallortigara, Nicky S. Clayton, Origins of spatial, temporal and numerical cognition: Insights from comparative psychology, pg 552–560, 2010, with permission from Elsevier.

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Chapter 13 - Origins of Spatial, Temporal, and Numerical Cognition: Insights from Comparative Psychology*

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