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THE PROJECT

At the roots of Spatial Numerical Association: From behavioral observation to neural basis, SNANeB

The SNANeB project is funded by the European Commission under the action “Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)”. Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships finance international mobility of experienced researchers of all ages, nationalities and scientific disciplines within European Countries or between a European country and a country outside Europe.  The goal of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships consists in giving researchers the chance to enhance their career by increasing international research experience and expanding new scientific competences.

Scientific background and aims

Only adult humans master complex math using symbols and language, but whenever their use is prevented, they can still represent numbers approximately. This approximate number sense emerges early in life and shows a pattern of similarities with the number sense of infants and animals. Uniquely human mathematical abilities appear to be scaffolded on this ontogenetically and evolutionarily ancient “number sense”.

A peculiarity of numbers is their strong association with space. Humans represent number on a left to right oriented Mental Number Line, with small numbers located on their left and larger ones on their right. Historically, the association between number and space has been considered a by-product of culture. Recent evidence reported a tendency to associate numbers and space in infants and newborns. Nevertheless, the researches that toss most uncertainties on the importance of language and symbolic thought for the origin of the spatial numerical association, SNA, come from comparative research. Evidence on the SNA in animals advocates that it originates from non-symbolic and biologically determined precursors, but these are still unknown.

This SNANeB project is focused on studying the SNA in day-old domestic chicks and monkeys, thus addressing its wellspring in the absence of language or culture and to unveil the neural basis of numerical cognition. A superior knowledge of neural representation of numbers will permit optimized designs of clinical applications to enhance numerical comprehension.

latest news

Ordinality in rats

10 June 2020
Rats are capable of learning to enter a target tunnel, to find a food, solely on the basis of its ordinal position in an array of six or 18 identical tunnels.
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https://www.numbersmeetspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ordinality_in_rats_numbersmeetspace.jpg 720 1280 cws https://www.numbersmeetspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/numbers_meet_space_400_135.png cws2020-06-10 17:12:332020-11-20 17:44:51Ordinality in rats

Ordinality in chicks

7 June 2020
Domestic chicks, soon after hatching, move and interact with their environment to follow the hen, to join their mates and to find food.
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https://www.numbersmeetspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ordinality_in_chicks_numbersmeetspace.jpg 720 1280 cws https://www.numbersmeetspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/numbers_meet_space_400_135.png cws2020-06-07 18:03:512020-11-20 17:20:22Ordinality in chicks

Ordinality in honeybees

1 June 2020
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are usually thought of as foragers, who fly flower to flower to collect nectar and pollen.
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https://www.numbersmeetspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ordinality_in_honeybees_numbersmeetspace.jpg 720 1280 cws https://www.numbersmeetspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/numbers_meet_space_400_135.png cws2020-06-01 16:32:182020-11-20 17:45:57Ordinality in honeybees
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LATEST POSTERS

  • A face is more than just a number for young domestic chicks. Individual processing of face-like displays supports 3vs.4 discrimination.10 February 2022 - 19:03
  • Middle identification and spatial numerical bias in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)10 February 2022 - 18:58

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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 795242

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