University of Padua

Magnitude shifts spatial attention from left to right in young rhesus monkeys

Rugani, Rosa and Platt, Michael and Yujia, Zhang and Brannon, Elizabeth (2023) Magnitude shifts spatial attention from left to right in young rhesus monkeys. [Data Collection]

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Humans represent numbers and quantities as increasingly orientated from left to right. Traditionally, these associations were considered cultural by-products. Recent comparative and developmental evidence challenged this idea. Newborns and animals have shown spatial-numerical association, but evidence on spatial-quantity association and the link between discrete and continuous magnitudes is sparce. Here, we explore whether the magnitude could shift the spatial bias from left to right in young rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). We designed a touch-screen task which required to remember and select a dot on which a target stimulus appeared. At test, monkeys faced arrays of 2, 4, 6 or 10 dots and maintained high performance through changes in arrays’ location, spacing and length. Remarkably, facing 2-dot arrays monkeys remembered better the left target; facing 6- or 10-dot arrays they remembered better the right targets. In a continuous transfer test, in which the array of dots was replaced with a long bar, they still remember better the right than left locations. Our results demonstrate that rhesus macaques transfer a learned rule from discrete to continuous magnitudes, proving that in animals the association with space is not limited to numbers but comprises other magnitudes, like in humans.

DOI: 10.25430/researchdata.cab.unipd.it.00000826
Keywords: Spatial quantitative association, SQUARC effect, Spatial numerical association, SNARC effect, mental number line, rhesus monkeys.
Subjects: Social Sciences and Humanities > The Human Mind and Its Complexity: Cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy of mind > Cognitive basis of human development and education, developmental disorders;comparative cognition
Social Sciences and Humanities > The Human Mind and Its Complexity: Cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy of mind > Attention, perception, action, consciousness
Social Sciences and Humanities > The Human Mind and Its Complexity: Cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy of mind > Learning, memory; cognition in ageing
Department: Departments > Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale (DPG)
Depositing User: Yujia Zhang
Date Deposited: 08 Feb 2023 08:01
Last Modified: 08 Feb 2023 08:01
Creators/Authors:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Rugani, Rosarosa.rugani@unipd.itorcid.org/0000-0001-5294-6306
Platt, Michaelmplatt@pennmedicine.upenn.eduorcid.org/0000-0003-3912-8821
Yujia, Zhangyujia.zhang@unipd.itorcid.org/0000-0002-0740-6383
Brannon, Elizabethebrannon@psych.upenn.eduUNSPECIFIED
Type of data: Database
Collection period:
FromTo
July 2020July 2020
Statement on legal, ethical and access issues: All experimental procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of the University of Pennsylvania and executed accordingly with their pertinent guidelines and regulations. The PROTOCOL # 806050 have also been revised by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) applying the expedited procedure set forth in 45 CFR 46.110 and approved on 05 February 2019.
Resource language: English
Metadata language: English
Publisher: Research Data Unipd
Date: 30 January 2023
Copyright holders: The Author
URI: https://researchdata.cab.unipd.it/id/eprint/826

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