Smart animals: animals think, use zero (Animals)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 10, 2021, 18:04 (1200 days ago) @ David Turell

Based on experiments:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/animals-can-count-and-use-zero-how-far-does-their-number...

"...rigorous experiments during the past two decades have shown that even animals with very small brains can perform incredible feats of numerical cognition. One mechanism common to all of them seems to be a system for approximating numerosity that’s correct most of the time but is sometimes imprecise in specific ways. Animals are most effective, for instance, at distinguishing numerosities far apart in magnitude — so comparing a group of six dots to three dots is easier than comparing six to five. When the difference between two numerosities is the same, it’s easier to deal with smaller quantities than larger ones: Discriminating 34 items from 38 is much more difficult than discriminating four from eight.

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"In the prefrontal cortex of monkeys, researchers found neurons that were selectively tuned to different numerosities. Neurons that responded to three dots on a screen also responded weakly to two and four, but not at all to more distant values, such as one or five.

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"That observation seems to imply that a “sense” of number is innate and deeply rooted in the brains of animals, including humans. “Underlying the sense of number, there is a very ancient, fundamental psychophysical law,” Vallortigara said.

"Once “you realize that almost every animal, or maybe even every animal, has some ability to do a numerical task, then you start wanting to know … what’s the threshold? What’s the limit?” said Scarlett Howard, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University in Australia who studies numerical cognition in honeybees. If animals had this natural, hard-wired ability for telling quantities apart, scientists wanted to determine what other abilities might emerge with it.

"First up was arithmetic. Several species have demonstrated that they can essentially add and subtract.

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"Honeybees, meanwhile, can be taught simple arithmetic.

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"Insects, birds and primates have also been trained to link symbols to numbers of elements. “We took the bees and taught them as if they were in primary school: this symbol represents this number,” Dyer said. “And they got the association.” Chimpanzees that have been trained to link numerosities to number symbols could also learn to touch the digits in ascending order.

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"Over and over again, she and others are finding evidence not just for a relatively simple, ubiquitous sense of numerosity in animals, but also for a growing inventory of much more abstract and complex forms of numerical cognition. That’s why for some neurobiologists, the current great frontier is in learning whether some animals’ grasp of numerical abstractions extends to the slippery concept of “nothing.”

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"...the researchers uncovered a familiar numerical understanding of zero: The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex. “From a physiological point of view, this fits in beautifully,” Nieder said. “We see exactly the same responses, the same type of code, represented in the crow brain as in the monkey brain.”

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"Why should animals have to recognize specific quantities at all? Why has evolution repeatedly made sure that animals can understand not just that four is less than five but that “four squares” is in some way conceptually the same as “four circles”?

"According to Vallortigara, one reason might be because arithmetic ends up being so important. “Animals continuously have to do arithmetic. Even simple animals,” he said. “If you have an abstract representation of numerosity, this is very easy to do.” Abstracting numerical information allows the brain to perform additional computations much more efficiently.

"That’s perhaps where zero fits in as well. If two predators enter an environment and only one leaves, the area remains dangerous.

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"Nieder hopes that his work on zero can help demonstrate how an abstract sense of number might emerge from a more approximate and practical one. He is currently conducting studies in humans to explore the relationship between non-symbolic numerical representations and symbolic ones more precisely.

"Vallortigara, Butterworth and some of their colleagues are now collaborating with Caroline Brennan, a molecular geneticist at Queen Mary University of London, to pin down the genetic mechanisms underlying numerical ability."

Comment: An enormous article filled with summaries of research. Simple counting is necessary, but these animlas are nowhere near human math.