Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) treat small and large numbers of items similarly during a relative quantity judgment task

Beran, Michael J.; Parrish, Audrey E.

doi:10.3758/s13423-015-0986-1

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 60 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Also, a similarity in the discrimination between quantities having the same ratio in the small and large numerical values, evidencing the numerical distance and size effect, are features that characterize the existence of the ANS. The finding of a similar discrimination sensitivity in the two numerical ranges has been reported in other animal species (DeLong, Barbato, O'Leary, & Wilcox, 2017;Irie-Sugimoto, Kobayashi, Sato, & Hasegawa, 2009; see also Beran & Parrish, 2016;Jones & Brannon, 2012), and a ratio effect found both in the small (as in the current study) and in the large number range (unlike the current study), supported the idea of one system (the ANS). Therefore, even though the pattern of discrimination exhibited by angelfish is, in some aspects, not fully consistent with the ANS, overall our results suggest that angelfish employed this system in the current study.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Quantity discrimination in angelfish, Pterophyllum scalare: a novel approach with food as the discriminant

Gómez‐Laplaza

Díaz-Sotelo

2018

Animal Behaviour

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ability to distinguish between different quantities of items is fundamental in many ecological contexts, and it has been shown in different animal species. This ability may also be context specific. Quantity estimation in fish has mainly been analysed in the context of social behaviour, whereas a majority of studies conducted with species other than fish tested it in the context of foraging. Surprisingly, little is known about the capacity of fish to discriminate between food quantities, possibly because of difficulties in testing individual fish in a novel, and thus aversive, test environment. Here, we present a novel approach that allows us to test single angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) while minimizing isolation related stress. In binary choice tests, sets composed of similarly-sized discrete food items differing in numerical size, were presented and the spontaneous (untrained) choice of angelfish was investigated. In all contrasts tested in three experiments, angelfish preferred the numerically larger to the smaller food set. The performance of the fish was ratio-dependent in the small but not in the large number range (> 4 food items, contrasts that were investigated for the first time in fishes), and there was no significant difference in the magnitude of preference in the small versus the large values. However, overall results indicated that the response was ratiodependent, with an increase in accuracy as the numerical ratio between the constrasts increased. Furthermore, the same numerical ratios that were successfully discriminated with small quantities were also similarly discriminated with large quantities. Altogether, our results thus imply that angelfish utilize the Approximate Number System of quantity representation for the entire numerical range tested, and that their response attempts to maximize foraging success.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Quantity discrimination in angelfish, Pterophyllum scalare: a novel approach with food as the discriminant

Gómez‐Laplaza

Díaz-Sotelo

2018

Animal Behaviour

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These new monkeys had far less previous experience in cognitive and behavioral tests compared to the monkeys in the first three experiments. They had participated in only a few cognitive studies in our laboratory that involved different quantity judgments (Beran and Parrish, in press; Parrish, Agrillo, Perdue, and Beran, 2016; Parrish, Brosnan, and Beran, 2015a). One monkey (Mason) was trained on a touchscreen computer and had participated in several facial-recognition studies that involved discriminating conspecific faces (Pokorny & de Waal, 2009a, 2009b; Pokorny, Webb, & de Waal, 2011).…”

Section: 1 Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-control assessments of capuchin monkeys with the rotating tray task and the accumulation task

Beran

Perdue

Rossettie

et al. 2016

Behavioural Processes

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent studies of delay of gratification in capuchin monkeys using a rotating tray (RT) task have shown improved self-control performance in these animals in comparison to the accumulation (AC) task. In this study, we investigated whether this improvement resulted from the difference in methods between the rotating tray task and previous tests, or whether it was the result of greater overall experience with delay of gratification tasks. Experiment 1 produced similar performance levels by capuchins monkeys in the RT and AC tasks when identical reward and temporal parameters were used. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar result using reward amounts that were more similar to previous AC experiments with these monkeys. In Experiment 3, monkeys performed multiple versions of the AC task with varied reward and temporal parameters. Their self-control behavior was found to be dependent on the overall delay to reward consumption, rather than the overall reward amount ultimately consumed. These findings indicate that these capuchin monkeys’ self-control capacities were more likely to have improved across studies because of the greater experience they had with delay of gratification tasks. Experiment 4 and Experiment 5 tested new, task-naïve monkeys on both tasks, finding more limited evidence of self-control, and no evidence that one task was more beneficial than the other in promoting self-control. The results of this study suggest that future testing of this kind should focus on temporal parameters and reward magnitude parameters to establish accurate measures of delay of gratification capacity and development in this species and perhaps others.

show abstract

“…Many species are capable of numerical cognition: For example, great apes [e.g., Beran, McIntyre, Garland, & Evans, ; Boysen & Berntson, ; Call, ; Hanus & Call, ], old‐ and new‐world monkeys [e.g., Barnard et al, ; Beran, Evans, Leighty, Harris, & Rice, ; Beran & Parrish, ], elephants (Perdue, Talbot, Stone, & Beran, ), bears (Vonk & Beran, ), raccoons (Davis, ), dogs (Ward & Smuts, ), cats (Pisa & Agrillo, ), birds [e.g., Rugani, Cavazzana, Vallortigara, & Regolin, ], fish [e.g., Potrich, Sovrano, Stancher, & Vallortigara, ], and even insects [bees: Dacke & Srinivasan, ; ants: Reznikova & Ryabko, ] are able to compare quantities, suggesting that representing numerosity is an evolutionary ancient trait. The practical advantages of such a capacity are obvious: in the context of foraging, for example, comparing quantities is a highly useful tool to identify the most profitable feeding location [see e.g., Farnsworth & Smolinski, and Hunt, Low, & Burns, for field experiments on quantity discrimination in a foraging context].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are great apes able to reason from multi‐item samples to populations of food items?

Eckert

Rakoczy

Call

2017

American J Primatol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Inductive learning from limited observations is a cognitive capacity of fundamental importance. In humans, it is underwritten by our intuitive statistics, the ability to draw systematic inferences from populations to randomly drawn samples and vice versa. According to recent research in cognitive development, human intuitive statistics develops early in infancy. Recent work in comparative psychology has produced first evidence for analogous cognitive capacities in great apes who flexibly drew inferences from populations to samples. In the present study, we investigated whether great apes (Pongo abelii, Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus, Gorilla gorilla) also draw inductive inferences in the opposite direction, from samples to populations. In two experiments, apes saw an experimenter randomly drawing one multi-item sample from each of two populations of food items. The populations differed in their proportion of preferred to neutral items (24:6 vs. 6:24) but apes saw only the distribution of food items in the samples that reflected the distribution of the respective populations (e.g., 4:1 vs. 1:4). Based on this observation they were then allowed to choose between the two populations. Results show that apes seemed to make inferences from samples to populations and thus chose the population from which the more favorable (4:1) sample was drawn in Experiment 1. In this experiment, the more attractive sample not only contained proportionally but also absolutely more preferred food items than the less attractive sample. Experiment 2, however, revealed that when absolute and relative frequencies were disentangled, apes performed at chance level. Whether these limitations in apes' performance reflect true limits of cognitive competence or merely performance limitations due to accessory task demands is still an open question.

show abstract

Capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) treat small and large numbers of items similarly during a relative quantity judgment task

Cited by 15 publications

References 60 publications

Quantity discrimination in angelfish, Pterophyllum scalare: a novel approach with food as the discriminant

Quantity discrimination in angelfish, Pterophyllum scalare: a novel approach with food as the discriminant

Self-control assessments of capuchin monkeys with the rotating tray task and the accumulation task

Are great apes able to reason from multi‐item samples to populations of food items?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About