ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2017
Number-space associations without language: Evidence from preverbal human infants and non-human animal species.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- Number-action coupling across the lifespan: Sensorimotor foundations of numerical cognition.iScience · 2026Review
- Numbers Driving Space: Experience With Numerical Sequences Modulates Spatial Behavior in Newborn Chicks (Gallus gallus).Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Spatial representation of magnitude in rhesus macaques: Investigating SNARC effects in quantity and size dimensions.Learning & behavior · 2026Article
- Spatial representation of serial order in working memory: a cross-cultural comparison between Japanese and Italian adults.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Kicking the mental number line: a kinematic investigation of numerical processing in childhood.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Prenatal light exposure affects number sense and the mental number line in young domestic chicks.eLife · 2025Article
- Cognitive bridge between geometric and numerical learning in monkeys.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The role of cognitive control in the interaction of the SNARC and MARC effects.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Does the Brain Care Which Direction We Read? A Cross-Cultural tDCS Study on Functional Lateralization of Number Processing.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Dichotomous horizontal representation of acute deterioration risk on illnesses.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Magnitude shifts spatial attention from left to right in rhesus monkeys as in the human mental number line.iScience · 2024Article
- Article
- Information Theory Opens New Dimensions in Experimental Studies of Animal Behaviour and Communication.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Asymmetric number-space association leads to more efficient processing of congruent information in domestic chicks.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Ordinality and Verbal Framing Influence Preschoolers' Memory for Spatial Structure.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2023Article
- An insect brain organizes numbers on a left-to-right mental number line.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Are prime numbers special? Insights from the life sciences.Biology direct · 2022Review
- Pitch-Luminance Crossmodal Correspondence in the Baby Chick: An Investigation on Predisposed and Learned Processes.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- No evidence of spatial representation of age, but "own-age bias" like face processing found in chimpanzees.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Relative numerical middle in rhesus monkeys.Biology letters · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is well known that humans describe and think of numbers as being represented in a spatial configuration, known as the 'mental number line'. The orientation of this representation appears to depend on the direction of writing and reading habits present in a given culture (e.g., left-to-right oriented in Western cultures), which makes this factor an ideal candidate to account for the origins of the spatial representation of numbers. However, a growing number of studies have demonstrated that non-verbal subjects (preverbal infants and non-human animals) spontaneously associate numbers and space. In this review, we discuss evidence showing that pre-verbal infants and non-human animals associate small numerical magnitudes with short spatial extents and left-sided space, and large numerical magnitudes with long spatial extents and right-sided space. Together this evidence supports the idea that a more biologically oriented view can account for the origins of the 'mental number line'. In this paper, we discuss this alternative view and elaborate on how culture can shape a core, fundamental, number-space association.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.