Geometry skills are innate, according to study

Daily Mail : Studies conducted by Pierre Pica of CNRS in France and his colleagues suggest that geometry skills are innate in humans, according to their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group studied 8 children and 22 adults of the Amazon tribe known as the Mundurucu, using 30 French and US adults and children as a control group. All participants were asked questions about lines, planes, angles, triangles, and spheres. The Mundurucu people’s responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and US respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words. The Amazonian tribe test results “suggest Euclidean geometry, inasmuch as it concerns basic objects ... , is a cross-cultural universal that results from the inherent properties of the human mind as it develops in its natural environment,” according to the paper’s authors.