Ciccione, L. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2024

The baboon as a statistician: Can non-human primates perform linear regression on a graph?

Recent studies showed that humans, regardless of age, education, and culture, can extract the linear trend of a noisy graph. Here, we examined whether such skills for intuitive statistics are confined to humans or may also exist in non-human primates. We trained Guinea baboons (Papio papio) to associate arbitrary geometrical shapes with the increasing or decreasing trends of noiseless and noisy scatterplots, while varying the number of points, the noise level, and the regression slope. Many baboons successfully learned this conditional match-to-sample task for both noiseless and noisy plots. Crucially, for successful baboons, accuracy varied as a sigmoid function of the t-value of the regression, the same statistical index upon which humans also base their answers, even after controlling for other variables. These results are compatible with the hypothesis that the human perception of data graphics is based on the pre-emption and recycling of a phylogenetically older competence of the primate visual system for extracting the principal axes of visual displays.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

Data plots are widely used in science, journalism and politics, since they efficiently allow to depict a large amount of information. Graphicacy, the ability to understand graphs, thus became a fundamental cultural skill. Here, we introduce a new measure of graphicacy that assesses the ability to detect a trend in noisy scatterplots ("does this graph go up or down?"). In 3943 educated participants, responses vary as a sigmoid function of the t-value that a statistician would compute to detect a significant trend. We find a minimum level of core graphicacy even in unschooled participants living in remote Namibian villages (N=87) and 6-year-old 1st-graders who never read a graph (N=27). However, the sigmoid slope (the "graphicacy index") varies across participants, increases with education, and tightly correlates with statistical knowledge, showing that experience contributes to refining graphical intuitions. Our tool is publicly available online and allows to quickly evaluate intuitive graphics skills. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCEThe rising cost of gas, the number of Covid deaths, the evolution of temperatures during the summer months: we often face graphs depicting these phenomena. The scientific literature has shown that human adults can intuit, within milliseconds, the statistical trend of these graphs. However, we do not know if these intuitions generalized to unschooled people and, most importantly, how to measure their variations in the population. In this study we show that intuitive graphics skills are present even in 6-year-old children who never saw a graph and in the Himba of Namibia, an indigenous people with no access to formal schooling. Furthermore, we developed a quantitative assessment of such intuitive graphics skills (which we called the "graphicacy index"), that everyone can easily obtain for free, through a short (10 minutes) online test: https://neurospin-data.cea.fr/exp/lorenzo-ciccione/graphicacy-index/. In summary, our study provides the first attempt to formally quantify human intuitions of statistical graphs.

scientific communication and education↗