Words needed to think about numbers? Study suggests so!
Massachusetts [US], February 10 : While one does need numbers to function every day, do we need words to think about numbers? A new study from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley discovered a strange relationship between numbers and words.
It was published in 'Psychological Science'.
Among many of the Tsimane' people, who lived in a remote region of the Bolivian rainforest, numbers did not play an important role in their lives, and people living in this society varied widely in how high they can count.
The study has found a relationship between the counting ability of Tsimane' individuals and their success at matching tasks that involve numbers up to about 25.
The researchers found that most subjects could accurately perform tasks that require matching numbers of objects, but only up to the highest number that they could count to.
The results suggested that in order to represent an exact quantity larger than four, people may need to have a word for that number, said Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences.
"This finding provides the clearest evidence to date that number words play a functional role in people's ability to represent exact quantities larger than four, and supports the broader claim that language can enable new conceptual abilities," said Gibson, one of the authors of the new study.
Berkeley postdoc Benjamin Pitt is the lead author of the paper. Steven Piantadosi, an assistant professor of psychology at Berkeley, is the senior author of the study.
( Details and picture courtesy ANI, the content is auto-generated from feed.)
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