Periodic Reporting for period 1 - QUANTA (Evolution of Cognitive Tools for Quantification)
Período documentado: 2021-09-01 hasta 2023-02-28
Exact quantification, including the ability to count, depends on both conceptual breakthroughs and cognitive tools such as numeral systems.
The overall goal of QUANTA is to investigate when, why, and how the cognitive tools for quantification emerged and evolved. To test key hypotheses on the striking diversity of these cognitive tools, the QUANTA project involves the compilation of comprehensive data on this diversity (across time, cultures, and modalities), their coding according to a joint coding grid, and the analysis of their diversification as a response to environmental, cultural, and cognitive driving forces.
By integrating an evolutionary approach with a cognitive perspective on quantification, QUANTA will transform this research field. Its novel strategy will, for the first time ever, yield substantiated insights into the emergence and evolution of numeral systems, thus advancing our understanding of human cognition and its dependence on cultural tools. While the highly interdisciplinary, multi-method approach renders this a high-risk project, QUANTA has the potential to bridge the gap between previously incommensurable fields.
The overall goal of QUANTA is to investigate when, why, and how the cognitive tools for quantification emerged and evolved. To test key hypotheses on the striking diversity of these cognitive tools, the QUANTA project involves the compilation of comprehensive data on this diversity (across time, cultures, and modalities), their coding according to a joint coding grid, and the analysis of their diversification as a response to environmental, cultural, and cognitive driving forces.
By integrating an evolutionary approach with a cognitive perspective on quantification, QUANTA will transform this research field. Its novel strategy will, for the first time ever, yield substantiated insights into the emergence and evolution of numeral systems, thus advancing our understanding of human cognition and its dependence on cultural tools. While the highly interdisciplinary, multi-method approach renders this a high-risk project, QUANTA has the potential to bridge the gap between previously incommensurable fields.
In the first financial reporting period, the four teams have therefore focused on creating the necessary conditions for conducting collaborative and successful research, including: recruitment of personnel, acquisition of major equipment (for the analysis of prehistoric artifacts), creation and/or completion of databases (specifically on verbal counting systems, body-based representations, and material artifacts), designing protocols for data collection, flow, curation, and integration as well as for empirical studies, and scientific exchange both across the different parts of the project (to ensure cross-disciplinary communication and understanding) and with the scientific communities beyond. As quality control of the large-scale databases and their alignment across disciplines will be critical for the success of the overall project, the teams have focused on these fundamental activities.
Major achievements include three rich databases (on verbal numeral systems, body-based number representations, and prehistoric artifacts), a joint coding grid for aligning the different types of data, and some tentative results from a first round of analyses.