FWIW, a sort of semantic congruity appears to be at work in the brains of monkeys, responsible perhaps for a type of abstract numeric processing.

Duke University cognitive neuroscientists have presented findings this week in Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science claiming the neural mechanism underlying numerical perception is evolutionarily primitive.

“When adult humans compare any two things, such as the size of two animals, and they’re asked ‘which is smaller, an ant or a rat?’ one might think it’s the same kind of question as ‘which is larger, an ant or a rat?’” said Brannon. “But humans are faster at saying an ant is smaller than saying a rat is larger. By contrast, if the two animals are large, such as a cow or an elephant, they’re quicker at saying the elephant is larger than saying the cow is smaller. This ‘semantic congruity’ holds for all kinds of comparisons, including numbers and distances.

“It would seem that this is entirely a linguistic effect, totally dependent on language,” said Brannon. “But we sought to understand whether monkeys showed this semantic effect, even though they don’t have language.”

They explain how they structures their experiment and conclude:

Clearly, even though their capability has nothing to do with language, it is nevertheless semantic in that the red and blue color cues carry meaning for the monkeys

Sure, I guess it has nothing to do with language though of course it depends upon your definition of language. If as their work implies we humans and monkeys both use a metaphoric layer to process numbers then I ask why would this not be language processing in both cases? Of course the work is hugely valuable and I find it pretty cool researches are better establishing how this capability exists in other animals, but methinks we need to also look deeper into the processing language of the metaphoric layer to understand what’s really going on in there.

Which reminds me, one of the film shoots we did for the 24×7 film experiment was with two neurobiologists and we got into some pretty heady material, I’d be curious to hear their opinions on the matter. Ah, and that reminds me that we should find a bit of that conversation to podcast or vlog, I’ll add that task to my todo list (it was an amazing shoot, more later).

via: Mitch Ratcliffe