CAREER: Evolution and Development of Numeracy

成年人用数字量化、标记和分类世界的几乎每一个方面。 使用数字的能力是人类拥有的最复杂的认知能力之一，通常被认为是人类思维的定义性特征。人类婴儿是否存在成人数学认知的发育前体？ 在非人类灵长类动物中是否存在人类计算思维的进化先驱？ 对于人类婴儿或非人类灵长类动物（在这种情况下，恒河猴）来说，数字是一个突出的维度吗？还是其他感知变量，如颜色和形状总是胜过数字？人类婴儿和猴子会做加法或减法吗？ 它们能表示异构对象数组中的对象数量吗？ 是否有非语言的方式来表示非人类灵长类动物和人类婴儿所共有的数字？ 在国家科学基金会职业奖的支持下，Brannon博士将使用行为注视时间方法和触摸屏任务来研究这些问题，这些任务测量人类婴儿，幼儿和恒河猴的准确性和反应时间。 这个项目的智力价值在于，它将为成年人数学能力的构建提供独特的新见解，并阐明没有语言的思维本质。 该研究的更广泛影响包括教育本科生，研究生和博士后水平的学生。 这项研究也是杜克大学非语言认知方法课程的基础，并出版了一本读者书，将动物和人类发展认知的经验论文配对，这将使比较发展方法研究认知的广泛传播。

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.