Summary of Seven More Studies on Numerosity Abilities in an Ant, Four of Them Relating to Human Competence

Abstract

Numerosity ability is an important biological trait. We examined this trait in the ant Myrmica sabuleti over sixteen experimental works. A summary of the first nine works has been already published, and we provide here a summary of the last seven works. During these last-mentioned studies, we successively showed that ants natively possess a number line, acquire the notion of zero through experiences, have their counting ability only slightly affected, depending on the characteristics of the elements to count, can acquire single symbolism, can learn several symbols at the same time, can add up using learned symbols and can learn a symbol for zero and use it to add. Four of these abilities correspond to potential problems of numerical competence in humans. Humans have natively a number line, but rarely, they may suffer from not having it, what then reduces their skills in mathematics. Humans have to acquire the notion of zero in the course of their life, but this notion is not always correctly taught to children. Also, after having been learned to add and subtract using a concrete representation of numbers, human children should learn calculating using different representations, and finally without using any concrete representation. Humans can easily acquire symbolisms, and this ability should be employed without delay over the children’s education. No doubt that more knowledge on animal numerosity ability will be acquired in the future, maybe to be related to human numerical competence.

Ants Can Anticipatively and Correctly Increment the Last Quantity of a Learned Arithmetic Sequence

“…It remains also to demonstrate that the ants do not anticipate the following number when characteristics of the cues are not constant all over the arithmetic sequence such as the sum of the area of the circles or the perimeters of the entire group of circles presented on a stand. However, we should note that it has been proved that the ants' counting of elements is not overly impacted by the size, the color and the relative position of the elements to count (Cammaerts & Cammaerts, 2020d).…”

Side effects of mirabegron studied on ants as models

“…The workers of M. sabuleti adapt their nesting site and their navigation to their visual and olfactory perception, adequately recruit nestmates, recognize themselves in a mirror, are imprinted to the appearance of the front of their congeners at their emergence as an imago, learn several social behaviors in the presence of older congeners, [16][17][18] have natively a number line, acquire the notion of zero through experiences, and can acquire numerical symbolisms. 19,20 Such as for vertebrates, including humans, their perception respond to the distance and the size effects as well as to Weber's law. 21,22…”

Ants Can Anticipate the Following Quantity in an Arithmetic Sequence

“…Vertebrates, especially birds and mammals, show the most derived numerical abilities (references in [ 16 , 17 ]). Some studies on the numerical skills of monkeys [ 18 ] and chimpanzees [ 19 ] suggest that (although this was not the object of these works), these primates would be able to anticipate the next quantity in a numerical sequence.…”

“…They also possess several numerosity abilities. Among the latter, they natively have a left-to-right-oriented number line, can acquire the notion of zero through experiences, can add and subtract numbers of visual or of olfactory cues if seeing the result of the operation during training, can acquire symbolisms including a symbol for zero, and can use learned symbols for adding and subtracting [ 16 , 17 ].…”