This is confirmed by a study by Carnegie Mellon University (United States). It posits that children and monkeys share a common understanding of geometry. Monkeys understand basic geometry. Primates have the ability to use tools, remember faces, and even learn to communicate with humans using sign language. They are considered among the most intelligent creatures on the planet. However, some concepts, such as geometry, were considered beyond the reach of humanity's closest relatives.
The study is published in the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'. It calls into question that predominant idea. "We were surprised not only that the monkeys could perform the task," they say. "It was that monkeys, children, and adults seemed to think about geometric relationships in a fundamentally similar way. "These intuitions are part of the basic architecture of the primate mind."
Experiments
To reach this conclusion, they offered olive baboons and rhesus macaques nutritious fruit snacks. It was in exchange for their participation in a two-dimensional geometric figure matching game on a touch screen. «That may seem easy. But it's actually quite difficult. There are no distinctive features between the objects, nor major differences in color, size or shape," they add. Instead, the monkeys had to find the correct match based solely on geometric similarity.
The same experiment was done with dozens of preschool children (ages 3 to 6) at Carnegie Mellon University Children's School. Also with 79 adults from the 'Tsimane' indigenous people of Bolivia. As a group of farmers and gatherers, the 'Tsimane' do not receive the same type of formal education as in the United States. Twenty-one American adults also participated in the study.
"That allowed us to differentiate age from cultural experience," says Cantlon. "When studying something in children, it can be difficult to discern whether their ability is the result of their development or whether they have learned it through education." Across all groups there was clear continuity in the way primates and humans conceived of basic geometry.
Use in education
If monkeys understand basic geometry, how can we take advantage of this knowledge? "Geometric intuition is something that humans, over time, transform into mathematics and science," they summarize. "If we want to understand how children learn geometry, we need to understand what background knowledge they have before formal instruction begins. This study suggests that children start from deep and ancestral intuitions about form and space. “Education can be based on those intuitions instead of treating geometry as something that must be taught from scratch.”
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