Eye Tracking Lateralized Spatial Associations in Early Childhood

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

“… 18 These findings suggest chicks have an intrinsic bias to represent number from left to right. Similar results were obtained when adult Clark’s nutcrackers, 19 adult rhesus monkeys, 20 and children 21 were tested using the same general paradigm. These findings suggest that when animals learn a numerical rule, they spontaneously organize the information from left to right.…”

“… 63 A visual processing advantage for the left space, supported by right hemispheric dominance, has been posited for processing global spatial-attentional 64 and quantity processing in infants 65 and newborns. 66 A left-to-right oriented attentional bias is especially pronounced when adults were asked to name the midpoint of numerical intervals without calculating, 49 , 50 , 57 , 67 , 68 and in ordinal tasks, in which Clark’s nutcrackers, domestic chicks, 19 monkeys, 20 and children 21 were required to identify always a specific position, e.g., the 4 th . It is plausible that ordinal tasks promoting the identification of an item in a constant array of discrete items on the basis of its spatial/ordinal position facilitate left-to-right oriented searching.…”

“…It is plausible that ordinal tasks promoting the identification of an item in a constant array of discrete items on the basis of its spatial/ordinal position facilitate left-to-right oriented searching. 19 , 20 , 21 , 63 , 69 On the other hand, shifts in behavioral responses from left to right occur only when numerosity and magnitude change. For instance, animals 29 , 33 , 34 and newborns 17 , 32 habituated to a specific numerosity displayed a left bias when faced with a new, smaller numerosity, but showed a right bias when presented with a larger numerosity.…”

Hybro chicks outperform Ross308 in a numerical-ordinal task. Cognitive and behavioral comparisons between 2 broiler strains of newborn domestic chicks (Gallus gallus)

“…We first trained all chicks to find a food reward in the 4th container in a series of 10 identical and sagittally aligned containers, which were maintained in fixed positions throughout training. We selected this kind of training because it has been extensively used to test ordinal abilities in animals (rats ( Davis and Bradford, 1986 ; Suzuki and Kobayashi, 2000 ), day-old domestic chicks ( Rugani et al, 2007 , 2010a , 2011 , 2016b ; Rugani and Regolin, 2020 , 2021 ), adult Clark's nutcrackers ( Rugani et al, 2010a ), fish ( Petrazzini et al, 2015 ; Potrich et al, 2019 ), rhesus monkeys ( Drucker and Brannon, 2014 )) and it was also adapted to test ordinal abilities in children ( West and McCrink, 2021 ; Rugani et al, 2022 ). Whereas in previous versions this task required subjects to reach a pre-established performance at training to enter the test, here we controlled that all subjects received the same amount of training.…”