2007/01/01 by Dustin J. Merritt, Evan L. MacLean, Sarah Jaffe +1 · 3 citations
Mathematics · Psychology · Neuroscience · #Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills #Child and Animal Learning Development #Language Development and Disorders #Lemur catta #Lemur #Primate #Biology #Evolutionary biology #Lineage (genetic) #Nonhuman primate #Neuroscience #Genetics
paper · doi:10.1037/0735-7036.121.4.363
openalex publication_date 2007/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/24
Research over the last 25 years has demonstrated that animals are able to organize sequences in memory and retrieve ordered sequences without language. Qualitative differences have been found between the serial organization of behavior in pigeons and monkeys. Here the authors test serial ordering abilities in ring-tailed lemurs, a strepsirrhine primate whose ancestral lineage diverged from that of monkeys, apes, and humans approximately 63 million years ago. Lemurs' accuracy and response times were similar to monkeys, thus suggesting that they may share mechanisms for serial organization that dates to a common primate ancestor.