Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures

What is it about?

The mapping of numbers onto space is fundamental to measurement and to mathematics. Is this mapping a cultural invention, or a universal intuition shared by all humans regardless of culture and education? We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and non-symbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, while Western adults used a linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers, and a logarithmic mapping when numbers were presented nonsymbolically under conditions that discouraged counting. Thus, the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition, and this initial intuition of number is logarithmic.

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Photo by Austris Augusts on Unsplash

Photo by Austris Augusts on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education.