La Jornada: Children and monkeys share a common understanding of geometry

Madrid. A new study from Carnegie Mellon University (United States) suggests that children and monkeys share a common understanding of geometry.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencescalls into question the idea that geometry is beyond the reach of non-human primates.

“What surprised us was not only that the monkeys could perform the task,” says Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and lead author of the study, “but that the monkeys, children, and adults seemed to think about geometric relationships in a similar way. This suggests that these intuitions are part of the basic architecture of the primate mind.”

To reach this conclusion, they offered olive baboons and rhesus macaques nutritious fruit snacks in exchange for their participation in a two-dimensional geometric figure matching game on a touch screen.

“That may seem easy, but it is actually very difficult, because there are no distinctive features between the objects or major differences in color, size or shape,” explains Cantlon. Instead, the monkeys had to find the correct match based solely on geometric similarity.

The researchers also conducted the same experiment with dozens of preschool children (ages 3 to 6) at the Carnegie Mellon University Children’s School, as well as 79 adults from the indigenous Tsimane people of Bolivia. As a group of farmers and gatherers, the Tsimane do not receive the same type of formal education as in the United States. Twenty-one American adults also participated in the study.

The researchers found that across all groups there was clear continuity in the way they conceived of basic geometry, suggesting that children start from deep, ancestral intuitions about form and space. “Education can be based on those intuitions instead of treating geometry as something that must be taught from scratch.”