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Ian Lyons, Georgetown University

The ability to guide behavior based on relative differences in perceived magnitudes is one of the most ancient cognitive capacities we know of. The ability to represent quantities in written, abstract and exact form is—as far as we know—exclusive to humans and only a few millennia in the making. Are these two abilities linked, and as for the latter, what took us so long? What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie numerical processing in humans and other species?

Ian Lyons is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University. He received a bachelor of science from Brown University in 2004 in Cognitive Science. In 2012, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago in Cognitive Psychology.