Overview
- The peer-reviewed paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports touchscreen shape-matching experiments that tested geometric reasoning across species and cultures.
- Researchers ran the tasks at the Seneca Park Zoo Primate Portal with eight adult monkeys (four olive baboons and four rhesus macaques) and then gave the same tests to U.S. preschoolers, 21 U.S. adults, and about 77 Tsimane' adults to separate age and schooling effects.
- Analysis showed monkeys were sensitive to geometric features such as symmetry, parallelism and angle relationships while humans were generally more accurate, placing both groups along a single, graded representational continuum rather than a categorical divide.
- The team released the study’s data, code and video publicly and used the Primate Portal’s free-touchscreen setup to allow animals to interact voluntarily with the tasks, supporting transparency and replication.
- Authors link the findings to deep evolutionary roots for spatial intuition—citing ancient engravings as context—and say formal education likely builds symbolic geometric skills on top of shared primate foundations, a pattern that could reshape how researchers study the origins of math reasoning.