Author summary Recent neural networks have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of visual tasks, often rivaling or surpassing human performance. Yet, it remains unclear whether these system...

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...

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In various cultures and at all spatial scales, humans produce a rich complexity of geometric shapes such as lines, circles or spirals. Here, we propos…

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for our ability to rapidly and flexibly adapt our behavior in new environments based on our previous experience. Despite its importance, the neural substrates a...

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Concepts of exact number are often thought to originate from counting and the successor function, or from a refinement of the approximate number system (ANS). We argue here for a third origin: a shared language-of-thought (LoT) for geometry and arithmetic that involves primitives of repetition, concatenation, and recursive embedding. Applied to sets, those primitives engender concepts of exact integers through recursive applications of additions and multiplications. Links between geometry and arithmetic also explain the emergence of higher-level notions (squares, primes, etc.). Under our hypothesis, understanding a number means having one or several mental expressions for it, and their minimal description length (MDL) determines how easily they can be mentally manipulated. Several historical, developmental, linguistic, and brain imaging phenomena provide preliminary support for our proposal.