Furry Math: Macaques can do sums like people in a hurry
By Susan Milius
Monkey see, monkey add. And in the same test of high-speed arithmetic, it turns out, people see and people add using what looks like the monkey method for doing rough sums without counting.
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“What we’re doing is accessing a primitive system for nonverbal arithmetic,” says Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University in Durham, N.C. She and Duke colleague Jessica Cantlon tested both rhesus macaques and college students for their ability to do split-second addition. Similarities in the two groups’ performance support the idea of an evolutionarily ancient capacity for dealing with numerical quantities, the researchers say in the December PLoS Biology.