You’re a primate, I’m a primate, monkeys are primates!Even before the release of my book Bringing Up Ziggy, I was studying all aspects of primates. And I’m not alone. By observing the other levels of primate order in behavior and learning, we often discover many similarities between ourselves and our closest biological species.Psychological researchers at Columbia University conducted tests showing that rhesus monkeys can decipher the difference between one, two and three. Now, Elizabeth M. Brannon, Ph.D. and Herbert S. Terrace, Ph.D., both psychologists at Columbia, designed experiments to discern whether monkeys could learn rules for putting objects into categories, and then apply those rules to a new set of objects. https://deniaviva.com Not so surprising to me, the scientists found that animals can not only be taught to count but actually understand the concept of numbers. The results of this new research was published in the January issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology.For this particular study, researchers created computer displays with numbers one, two, three and four using visual objects such as circles, ellipses, squares or diamonds of varying size and color. Three monkeys were then taught to touch each display in numerical order, for example, using a two in ascending order, one in descending order.Overtime, the monkeys were trained on some 35 different displays. Assessing their continued progress, the researchers then tested the monkeys on 150 new displays, only to find their performance did not falter.
Guest Post
