ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Comparative cognition of number and space: the case of geometry and of the mental number line.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 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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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Culture shapes the SNARC-like effect for visual speed.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The Social Relevance of Numbers: Insights from Animal Studies.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Prenatal light exposure affects number sense and the mental number line in young domestic chicks.eLife · 2025Article
- A SNARC-like effect for visual speed.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Does the Brain Care Which Direction We Read? A Cross-Cultural tDCS Study on Functional Lateralization of Number Processing.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- A left-to-right bias in number-space mapping across ages and cultures.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Interpreting insect behavior through the lens of executive functions.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Dichotomous horizontal representation of acute deterioration risk on illnesses.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Invariant representations in abstract concept grounding - the physical world in grounded cognition.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Analogue magnitude representation of angles and its relation to geometric expertise.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Magnitude shifts spatial attention from left to right in rhesus monkeys as in the human mental number line.iScience · 2024Article
- Article
- Differential roles of brain oscillations in numerical processing: evidence from resting-state EEG and mental number line.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Cortical representation of musical pitch in event-related potentials.Biomedical engineering letters · 2023Article
- No clear evidence for an innate left-to-right mental number line.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Reply to Pitt et al.: Evidence from bees is consistent with a biological origin of a left-to-right mental number line.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Geometry-based navigation in the dark: layout symmetry facilitates spatial learning in the house cricket, Acheta domesticus, in the absence of visual cues.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Two Are Better Than One: Integrating Spatial Geometry with a Conspicuous Landmark in Zebrafish Reorientation Behavior.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Asymmetric number-space association leads to more efficient processing of congruent information in domestic chicks.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evidence is discussed about the use of geometric information for spatial orientation and the association between space and numbers in non-human animals. A variety of vertebrate species can reorient using simple Euclidian geometry of the environmental surface layout, i.e. in accord with metric and sense (right/left) relationships among extended surfaces. There seems to be a primacy of geometric over non-geometric information in spatial reorientation and, possibly, innate encoding of the sense of direction. The hippocampal formation plays a key role in geometry-based reorientation in mammals, birds, amphibians and fish. Although some invertebrate species show similar behaviours, it is unclear whether the underlying mechanisms are the same as in vertebrates. As to the links between space and number representations, a disposition to associate numerical magnitudes onto a left-to-right-oriented mental number line appears to exist independently of socio-cultural factors, and can be observed in animals with very little numerical experience, such as newborn chicks and human infants. Such evidence supports a nativistic foundation of number-space association. Some speculation about the possible underlying mechanisms is provided together with consideration on the difficulties inherent to any comparison among species of different taxonomic groups.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The origins of numerical abilities'.
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