Journal ArticleDOI
Core Knowledge of Geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group@@@Mastering the Geometry of the Jungle (Or Doin' What Comes Naturally)
Norton Starr,Stanislas Dehaene,Véronique Izard,Pierre Pica,Elizabeth S. Spelke,Nicholas Bakalar +5 more
TLDR
Children and adults in the Mundurukú spontaneously made use of basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallelism, or right angles to detect intruders in simple pictures, and they used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometrical maps to locate hidden objects.Abstract:
Does geometry constitute a core set of intuitions present in all humans, regardless of their language or schooling? We used two nonverbal tests to probe the conceptual primitives of geometry in the Mundurukú, an isolated Amazonian indigene group. Mundurukú children and adults spontaneously made use of basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallelism, or right angles to detect intruders in simple pictures, and they used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometrical maps to locate hidden objects. Our results provide evidence for geometrical intuitions in the absence of schooling, experience with graphic symbols or maps, or a rich language of geometrical terms.read more
Citations
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The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics
Diane F. Halpern,Camilla Persson Benbow,David C. Geary,Ruben C. Gur,Janet Shibley Hyde,Morton Ann Gernsbacher +5 more
TL;DR: It is concluded that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways.
Journal ArticleDOI
Illiterate to literate: behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition
TL;DR: Literacy acquisition provides a remarkable example of how the brain reorganizes to accommodate a novel cultural skill.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social Ecology: Lost and Found in Psychological Science.
Shigehiro Oishi,Jesse Graham +1 more
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that economic systems, political systems, religious systems, climates, and geography exert a distal yet important influence on human mind and behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians
Marie Amalric,Stanislas Dehaene +1 more
TL;DR: The results suggest that high-level mathematical thinking makes minimal use of language areas and instead recruits circuits initially involved in space and number, which may explain why knowledge of number and space, during early childhood, predicts mathematical achievement.
References
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Book
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
TL;DR: A handsome annotated edition of Albert Einstein's celebrated book on relativity was published in 2017 as discussed by the authors, along with commentaries by Hanoch Gutfreund and Jurgen Renn that examine the evolution of Einstein's thinking and cast his ideas in a modern context.
MonographDOI
Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity
TL;DR: This article showed that even in a core cognitive domain like spatial thinking, language influences how people think, memorize and reason about spatial relations and directions, and that non-linguistic cognition mirrors the systems available in the local language.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics
Diane F. Halpern,Camilla Persson Benbow,David C. Geary,Ruben C. Gur,Janet Shibley Hyde,Morton Ann Gernsbacher +5 more
TL;DR: It is concluded that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways.
Journal ArticleDOI
Illiterate to literate: behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition
TL;DR: Literacy acquisition provides a remarkable example of how the brain reorganizes to accommodate a novel cultural skill.