The Cultural Challenge in Mathematical Cognition

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Abstract

In their recent paper on “Challenges in mathematical cognition”, Alcock and colleagues (Alcock et al. [2016]. Challenges in mathematical cognition: A collaboratively-derived research agenda. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 2, 20-41) defined a research agenda through 26 specific research questions. An important dimension of mathematical cognition almost completely absent from their discussion is the cultural constitution of mathematical cognition. Spanning work from a broad range of disciplines – including anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science, history of science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology – we argue that for any research agenda on mathematical cognition the cultural dimension is indispensable, and we propose a set of exemplary research questions related to it.

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Most cited references 68

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The weirdest people in the world?

Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, Ara Norenzayan (2010)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

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Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words

Jill Larkin, Herbert Simon (1987)

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Core systems of number.

Lisa Feigenson, Stanislas Dehaene, Elizabeth S. Spelke (2004)

What representations underlie the ability to think and reason about number? Whereas certain numerical concepts, such as the real numbers, are only ever represented by a subset of human adults, other numerical abilities are widespread and can be observed in adults, infants and other animal species. We review recent behavioral and neuropsychological evidence that these ontogenetically and phylogenetically shared abilities rest on two core systems for representing number. Performance signatures common across development and across species implicate one system for representing large, approximate numerical magnitudes, and a second system for the precise representation of small numbers of individual objects. These systems account for our basic numerical intuitions, and serve as the foundation for the more sophisticated numerical concepts that are uniquely human.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (publisher-id): JNC

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Numer Cogn

Title: Journal of Numerical Cognition

Abbreviated Title: J. Numer. Cogn.

Publisher: PsychOpen

ISSN (Electronic): 2363-8761

Publication date (Electronic): 07 September 2018

Publication date Collection: 2018

Volume: 4

Issue: 2

Pages: 448-463

Affiliations

[a ]Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen , Bergen, Norway

[b ]SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE), University of Bergen , Bergen, Norway

[c ]Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University , Detroit, MI, USA

[d ]Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol , Bristol, United Kingdom

[e ]Center for Cognitive Archaeology, University of Colorado , Colorado Springs, CO, USA

[f ]Graduate School of Education, University of California , Berkeley, CA, USA

[g ]Department of Philosophy, McGill University , Montreal, Canada

Author notes

[* ]Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, Postbox 7807, N-5020 Bergen, Norway. Tel.: +47 55 58 90 81. andrea.bender@ 123456uib.no

Article

Publisher ID: jnc.v4i2.137

DOI: 10.5964/jnc.v4i2.137

SO-VID: af1fd2e6-8765-40dd-b021-2872054a4db9

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The Cultural Challenge in Mathematical Cognition

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Abstract

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PsychOpen

Most cited references 68

The weirdest people in the world?

Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words

Core systems of number.

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