The findings challenge the idea that humans crossed a sharp evolutionary divide when they learned to recognize geometric properties like symmetry, parallel lines and right angles, the researchers say.
The research, published July 20 in the journal PNAS, adds to a long-standing scientific debate over whether humans possess entirely unique forms of abstract thought or unusually sophisticated versions of abilities found elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
In other words, the study suggested that baboons and macaques don't lack the ability to reason about geometry. Instead, they just aren't as proficient at it as humans, meaning that humans didn't evolve a new unique skill in understanding geometry.
"Every day he came to the touch screen," Jialin Li, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University and first author of the study, told Live Science. "He just sat there and worked for two hours, three hours straight, completing thousands of trials. That's just amazing."
The researchers then compared the animals' performance with that of 58 U.S. preschoolers ages 3 to 6, and 79 adults from the Tsimané, an Indigenous farmer-forager society in Bolivia whose members received little formal education. A separate experiment in the larger project involving rotating shapes also included 21 U.S. adults.
"[The participants] see a sample shape first," Li said. "For example, it's a square. Then they need to tap the square to make sure that they are looking at it. When they tap it, there will be two shape choices that come up: one on the left and one on the right. They need to choose which shape matches with the sample shape."
Two olive baboons participated in the Primate Portal experiments at the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, New York. (Image credit: Rochester Institute of Technology)
Correct answers earned the monkeys fruit-flavored cereal pellets, preschoolers collected stickers that could later be exchanged for prizes, and adults received verbal feedback. Incorrect answers triggered a "bonk" sound and a short timeout from the game.
"We often think that this matching task will be super easy for humans," Li said. "But actually, young kids were struggling in completing the task in telling the shapes apart, which makes them more similar to monkeys."
The researchers then used computer models to investigate which visual properties best predicted participants' decisions. One model represented simple details, such as edges and lines. Another represented more complex information about a shape's overall form. A third encoded discrete geometric properties, such as equal sides, equal angles, symmetry and parallelism — an approach the researchers described as "symbolic."
If abstract geometry depended on a uniquely human symbolic system, only the human participants would have shown evidence of using that thought process. Instead, both monkeys and humans appeared to rely on a mixture of complex visual information and symbolic-like features. Adult humans generally performed the best, followed by preschoolers and monkeys, but their results overlapped. This finding suggests that the differences were quantitative, meaning humans are simply better at the same underlying kind of geometric reasoning rather than possessing an entirely unique ability., Monkeys relied roughly three times more strongly on the symbolic model when the shapes were rotated than when they remained upright.
Ancient roots of geometry
The results do not mean that monkeys understand formal mathematics, Brannon cautioned. "Human mathematical reasoning extends far beyond recognizing geometric regularities — it includes language, formal proof, recursive reasoning and cultural transmission."
Giorgio Vallortigara, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Trento in Italy who was not involved in the study, agrees with Brannon and her colleagues' conclusions.
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Li and Cantlon are now breaking down shapes into components such as angles, side lengths and numbers of sides to identify which properties are the hardest for monkeys and humans to understand. Cantlon described the follow-up as "a deconstructed geometry task."
"Evolution rarely invents entirely new mechanisms from scratch," Brannon said. "More often, it refines, recombines and extends existing ones."
What do you know about chimpanzees and great apes? Test your smarts with our primate quiz!
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