Since Rene Descarte, the 3 dimensional has ruled the mindset of our scientifically driven world view. Then science developed geometries based on the idea that space may be curved.

To many that idea seems almost foreign. Sure the earth is curved but mathematically we think on terms of straight lines in at least 3 dimension as standard.

Or do we?

“Is this mapping a cultural invention or a universal intuition shared by all humans regardless of culture and education?” asked a study by Stanislas Dehaene, Véronique Izard, Elizabeth Spelke and Pierre Pica published in Science of May 2008.

The study, Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education.

“At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale” concluded the researchers.
In contrast, Western adults used linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers, but for number that were not conducive to counting they used logarithmic mapping.
“Constructivist theories claim mathematics as a set of cultural inventions that are progressively refined in the history of mathematics and are slowly acquired during childhood and adolescence” the wrote.
The study attempted to find if mental construction of mathematics may have deeper foundations.
Previous psychological and neuroimaging research states a sense of number is present in humans and many other species at an early age in the substrate in the bilateral intraparietal sulcus.
Previous experiments demonstate that kindergarteners understand the task and behave nonrandomly, systematically placing smaller numbers at left and larger numbers at right. However, they “do not distribute the numbers evenly, however, and instead devote more space to small numbers, imposing a compressed logarithmic mapping.”

This study showed that adult Mundurucu Indians who had little Western education mapped numbers logarithmically.
“The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education” they said.

Neither linguistic competence, nor numerical vocabulary and verbal counting induced a shift from the log-to-linear mapping.

This obeys Weber's psychophysical law that states increasingly larger quantities are represented with proportionally greater imprecision observed with animal and infant studies.

However, it is contrary to Whorf's hypothesis which claims language determines the organization of thought.

In American children, logarithmic mapping does not disappear all at once, but vanishes first for small numbers and much later for larger numbers from 1 to 1000, up to fourth or sixth grade in some children.