As part of the IHPST’s Séminaire PhilSciCog at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Véronique Izard will talk about “Cognitive Foundations of Geometry” on March 26, 2026, from 02:00–03:30 (UTC). The hybrid session can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 950 6108 6376, Code: 535047). The abstract reads:
From the first months of life, young children can perceive numeric quantities and perform additive or multiplicative operations on quantities. These abilities support the acquisition of number concepts later in life, and have been proposed to enable humans’ arithmetic cognition. What about geometry, another major branch of mathematics? In this talk, I will present two recent studies assessing the scope and the limits of human geometric intuition. The first study focused on Euclidean geometry, and found that children and adults encode a rich repertoire of geometric properties, at several levels of abstraction. The second study probed intuitions for non-Euclidean geometry and revealed the existence of a pervasive Euclidean bias in adults, identifying limits to the flexibility of human geometric intuition.