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Concept
Numerical cognition
Summary
Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience and cognitive linguistics. This discipline, although it may interact with questions in the philosophy of mathematics, is primarily concerned with empirical questions.
Topics included in the domain of numerical cognition include:
How do non-human animals process numerosity?
How do infants acquire an understanding of numbers (and how much is inborn)?
How do humans associate linguistic symbols with numerical quantities?
How do these capacities underlie our ability to perform complex calculations?
What are the neural bases of these abilities, both in humans and in non-humans?
What metaphorical capacities and processes allow us to extend our numerical understanding into complex domains such as the concept of infinity, the infinitesimal or the concept of the limit in calculus?
Heuristics in numerical cognition
A variety of research has demonstrated that non-human animals, including rats, lions and various species of primates have an approximate sense of number (referred to as "numerosity"). For example, when a rat is trained to press a bar 8 or 16 times to receive a food reward, the number of bar presses will approximate a Gaussian or Normal distribution with peak around 8 or 16 bar presses. When rats are more hungry, their bar pressing behavior is more rapid, so by showing that the peak number of bar presses is the same for either well-fed or hungry rats, it is possible to disentangle time and number of bar presses. In addition, in a few species the parallel individuation system has been shown, for example in the case of guppies which successfully discriminated between 1 and 4 other individuals.
Similarly, researchers have set up hidden speakers in the African savannah to test natural (untrained) behavior in lions.
Official source
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