ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Sensitivity to geometric shape regularity in humans and baboons: A putative signature of human singularity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 115 citations in OpenAlex.
- Diverse mathematical knowledge among indigenous Amazonians.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Pooled it
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- Complexity is a unified cognitive kind.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Cognitive maps as a medium for thought.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Continuity in geometric intuition between humans and monkeys.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Initial organization and progressive expansion of the math-responsive brain network during the first school years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Can neural networks model the human perception of geometric shapes?PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Robust representation of the spatial arrangement of topological features.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Children use algorithm induction to discover patterns in data.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Traces of Intentionality: Balance, Complexity, and Organization in Artworks by Humans and Apes.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Intuitions of mathematical curves in young children's drawings.Cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- Impact of Education and Music Training on the Development of Abstract Thinking in the First Years of Schooling.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Earliest geometries: A cognitive investigation of Howiesons Poort engraved ostrich eggshells.PloS one · 2026Article
- Visual Search Task Reveals Categorical Representation of Topological Spatial Relations Between Objects.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- From shape to number: Shape-from-dots homogeneity boosts groupitizing enumeration.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing.iScience · 2025Article
- Abstract rule learning and generalization in human and nonhuman primates.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The detection of algebraic auditory structures emerges with self-supervised learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Cognitive bridge between geometric and numerical learning in monkeys.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Among primates, humans are special in their ability to create and manipulate highly elaborate structures of language, mathematics, and music. Here we show that this sensitivity to abstract structure is already present in a much simpler domain: the visual perception of regular geometric shapes such as squares, rectangles, and parallelograms. We asked human subjects to detect an intruder shape among six quadrilaterals. Although the intruder was always defined by an identical amount of displacement of a single vertex, the results revealed a geometric regularity effect: detection was considerably easier when either the base shape or the intruder was a regular figure comprising right angles, parallelism, or symmetry rather than a more irregular shape. This effect was replicated in several tasks and in all human populations tested, including uneducated Himba adults and French kindergartners. Baboons, however, showed no such geometric regularity effect, even after extensive training. Baboon behavior was captured by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but neither CNNs nor a variational autoencoder captured the human geometric regularity effect. However, a symbolic model, based on exact properties of Euclidean geometry, closely fitted human behavior. Our results indicate that the human propensity for symbolic abstraction permeates even elementary shape perception. They suggest a putative signature of human singularity and provide a challenge for nonsymbolic models of human shape perception.
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