Hatching with Numbers: Pre-natal Light Exposure Affects Number Sense and the Mental Number Line in young domestic chicks

Humans order numerosity along a left-to-right Mental Number Line (MNL), traditionally considered culturally rooted. Yet, some species at birth show Spatial-Numerical Associations, SNA, suggesting neural origins. Various accounts link SNA to brain lateralization, but lack evidence.

We investigated brain lateralization effects on numerical spatialization in 100 newborn domestic chicks. In-ovo light exposure yielded strongly-lateralized brains in half the chicks and weakly-lateralized in the other half. Chicks learned to select the 4^thitem in a sagittal array. At test, the array was rotated 90°, with left and right 4^thitems correct. Strongly-lateralized chicks outperformed weakly-lateralized ones when ordinal and spatial cues were reliable (experiment 1), but not with unreliable spatial cues (experiment 2). Moreover, only strongly-lateralized chicks showed left-to-right directionality, suggesting the right hemisphere’s key role in integrating spatial and numerical cues. We demonstrate that brain lateralization is fundamental for developing a left-to-right oriented SNA.