CAREER: Evolution and Development of Numeracy

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Adult humans quantify, label, and categorize almost every aspect of the world with numbers. The ability to use numbers is one of the most complex cognitive abilities that humans possess and is often held up as a defining feature of the human mind. Are there developmental precursors to adult mathematical cognition in human infants? Are there evolutionary precursors to the human computational mind in non-human primates? Is number a salient dimension for human infants or non-human primates (in this case, rhesus monkeys) or do other perceptual variables such as color and shape always trump number? Can human infants and monkeys add or subtract? Can they represent the number of objects in a heterogeneous array of objects? Are there nonlinguistic ways of representing number that are common to non-human primates and human infants? With support from a National Science Foundation CAREER award, Dr. Brannon will investigate these questions using both behavioral looking time methods and touch screen tasks that measure accuracy and reaction time in human infants, young children, and rhesus monkeys. The intellectual merit of this project is that it will provide unique new insights into the building blocks of adult human mathematical abilities and shed light on the nature of thought without language. The broader impact of the research includes educating students at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels. The research is also the bases of a Duke University methods course on nonverbal cognition and a published reader that will pair empirical papers on animal and human developmental cognition, which will allow broad dissemination of the comparative developmental approach to studying cognition.