Magnitude shifts spatial attention from left to right in rhesus monkeys as in the human mental number line

Abstract

Humans typically represent numbers and quantities along a left-to-right continuum. Early perspectives attributed number-space association to culture; however, recent evidence in newborns and animals challenges this hypothesis. We investigate whether the length of an array of dots influences spatial bias in rhesus macaques. We designed a touch-screen task that required monkeys to remember the location of a target. At test, monkeys maintained high performance with arrays of 2, 4, 6, or 10 dots, regardless of changes in the array's location, spacing, and length. Monkeys remembered better left targets with 2-dot arrays and right targets with 6- or 10-dot arrays. Replacing the 10-dot array with a long bar, yielded more accurate performance with rightward locations, consistent with an underlying left-to-right oriented magnitude code. Our study supports the hypothesis of a spatially oriented mental magnitude line common to humans and animals, countering the idea that this code arises from uniquely human cultural learning.