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Monkeys have a semantic perception of numbers similar to that of humans and language-independent. It was discovered some cognitive neuroscientists at Duke University, expressed that the neural mechanism underlying numerical perception is evolutionarily innate.

Jessica Cantlon and Elizabeth Brannon described their study with macaque monkeys in an article published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their experiment, the researchers sought to determine whether monkeys exhibit a phenomenon called "semantic congruity" when making numerical comparisons. "When adult humans have to make a comparison, for example between the size of two animals," said Brannon, "wondering which one is bigger or smaller which are two different things. A man, in fact, is the first to say that the ant is small rather than saying that the rat is larger. However, if the two animals are both large, like a cow and an elephant, the man is quicker to say that the elephant is bigger instead of saying that the cow is smaller. This "semantic congruity 'holds for any type of comparison, even between numbers or between distances. It would seem entirely a linguistic effect, that is language dependent. We tried to figure out if this was also in monkeys, which do not have the word ".

Cantlon and Brannon showed the number of two macaques points placed randomly on a computer screen. The monkeys were trained to choose the number of points higher than when the bottom of the screen was blue, and the smaller number when the bottom was red.

As a reward, the animals received a sweet drink for each correct answer.

"The results," says Cantlon, "reveal a significant effect of semantic congruity.

For example, when the pairs of numbers were small, like 2 and 3, the monkeys were much faster if they had to choose the least amount. We were impressed by the high level of precision achieved animals to make this difficult discrimination. "

The discovery is further proof of the fundamental similarity in numerical thinking of men and non-human primates.