One-to-one correspondence without language

Sarah E Koopman; Alyssa M Arre; Steven T Piantadosi; Jessica F Cantlon

doi:10.1098/rsos.190495

One-to-one correspondence without language

R Soc Open Sci. 2019 Oct 30;6(10):190495. doi: 10.1098/rsos.190495. eCollection 2019 Oct.

Authors

Sarah E Koopman¹, Alyssa M Arre², Steven T Piantadosi^{1

3}, Jessica F Cantlon^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, 500 Wilson Boulevard, Rochester, NY, USA.
² Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
³ Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
⁴ Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Abstract

A logical rule important in counting and representing exact number is one-to-one correspondence, the understanding that two sets are equal if each item in one set corresponds to exactly one item in the second set. The role of this rule in children's development of counting remains unclear, possibly due to individual differences in the development of language. We report that non-human primates, which do not have language, have at least a partial understanding of this principle. Baboons were given a quantity discrimination task where two caches were baited with different quantities of food. When the quantities were baited in a manner that highlighted the one-to-one relation between those quantities, baboons performed significantly better than when one-to-one correspondence cues were not provided. The implication is that one-to-one correspondence, which requires intuitions about equality and is a possible building block of counting, has a pre-linguistic origin.

Keywords: animal cognition; cognitive development; mathematical cognition; non-human primate; numerical equivalence.

Grants and funding

R01 HD085996/HD/NICHD NIH HHS/United States