ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences2025
Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?
Review in Trends in cognitive sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Structure Beneath the Symbols: How Children Develop an Understanding of Place Value.Current directions in psychological science · 2026Article
- Complexity is a unified cognitive kind.Nature human behaviour · 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
- Intuitions of mathematical curves in young children's drawings.Cognition · 2026Article
- The neurobiology of human sequential signal prediction: Insights from language, music, and mathematics.Neuroscience research · 2026Review
- Evaluating Early Precursors of Academic Skills: Preliminary Validation of a Touchscreen-Based Digital Assessment in Preschoolers.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing.iScience · 2025Article
- Decimal systems around the world.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Concepts of exact number are often thought to originate from counting and the successor function, or from a refinement of the approximate number system (ANS). We argue here for a third origin: a shared language-of-thought (LoT) for geometry and arithmetic that involves primitives of repetition, concatenation, and recursive embedding. Applied to sets, those primitives engender concepts of exact integers through recursive applications of additions and multiplications. Links between geometry and arithmetic also explain the emergence of higher-level notions (squares, primes, etc.). Under our hypothesis, understanding a number means having one or several mental expressions for it, and their minimal description length (MDL) determines how easily they can be mentally manipulated. Several historical, developmental, linguistic, and brain imaging phenomena provide preliminary support for our proposal.
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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.