Monkeys match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they see.

By Kerry E. Jordan, Elizabeth M. Brannon, Nikos K. Logothetis, Asif A. Ghazanfar. 2005

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Convergent evidence demonstrates that adult humans possess numerical representations that are independent of language [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6]. Human infants and nonhuman animals can also make purely numerical discriminations, implicating both developmental and evolutionary bases for adult humans' language-independent representations of number [7 and 8]. Recent evidence suggests that the nonverbal representations of number held by human adults are not constrained by the sensory modality in which they were perceived [9]. Previous studies, however, have yielded conflicting results concerning whether the number representations held by nonhuman animals and human infants are tied to the modality in which they were established [10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15]. Here, we report that untrained monkeys preferentially looked at a dynamic video display depicting the number of conspecifics that matched the number of vocalizations they heard. These findings suggest that number representations held by monkeys, like those held by adult humans, are unfettered by stimulus modality.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, Statistics and Probability

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Citations in the corpus

Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers (2009, background): “In all of these studies, however, matching was elicited either by drawing on cross-modal correspondences that were familiar [faces and voices (15, 16) or objects with similar features presented across the visual and tactile modalities (18)], or by presenting a familiarization phase in which events i”
Heterochrony and Cross-Species Intersensory Matching by Infant Vervet Monkeys (2009, background): “infant Old World monkeys [6,7,8,9] and humans [10,11,12].”