Towards numerical cognition's origin: insights from day-old domestic chicks

Abstract

Instead of the scepticism on animal numerical understanding that characterized the first half of the twentieth century, in recent decades, a large and increasing body of the literature has shown that adult animals can master a variety of non-symbolic (in the absence of symbols such as mathematical words) numerical tasks. Nonetheless, evidence proving early numerical abilities in non-human animals was sparse. In this paper, I report the ongoing work to investigate numerical cognition in the day-old domestic chick (). Unlike previous studies on adult animals, chicks can be tested very early in life, which gives us the opportunity to discover the origins of numerical comprehension. Here, I discuss studies revealing that day-old domestic chicks can: (i) discriminate between different numbers of objects; (ii) solve rudimentary arithmetic operations; and (iii) use ordinal information, identifying a target element (e.g. the fourth) in a series of identical elements, on the basis of its serial-numerical position. Some of these abilities are number-specific, while others underlie the interplay between number and continuous extents (continuous-quantity cues that covary with number, such as area and perimeter). These data are discussed in terms of ontogenetic development of mathematical comprehension.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The origins of numerical abilities'.

Fast saccadic eye-movements in humans suggest that numerosity perception is automatic and direct

“…The ability to rapidly estimate the number of enemies or prey, or food sources, can have obvious evolutionary benefits. Many animals, including primates [1], birds [2,3], fish [4], and even insects [5], can discriminate the number of elements in a scene, and many-including honeybees, even have the concept of zero [6,7]. It has been proposed that humans and animals share a 'number sense' that enables them to quickly perceive the number of objects in an image [8,9].…”

Response of male and female domestic chicks to change in the number (quantity) of imprinting objects

“…Overall, this evidence shows that animals spontaneously (in the absence of any numerical training) discriminate between numerousnesses to deal with various circumstances in their everyday life. Therefore, animal brains seem to be naturally equipped to use simple numerical cues (Nieder, 2019 ; Rugani, 2018 ; Vallortigara, 2015 , 2017 ). Using operant conditioning, several animal species have learned to distinguish stimuli based on the absolute number of items (Bogale et al, 2011 ; Bortot et al, 2019 ; Ditz & Nieder, 2016 ; Pepperberg, 2010 ; Smirnova, Lazareva, & Zorina, 2000 ; Xia et al, 2001 ).…”

Insect-Inspired Sequential Inspection Strategy Enables an Artificial Network of Four Neurons to Estimate Numerosity

“…The symbolic, language-based mathematics we use, however, appears to be rooted in a predisposition to use quantitative information without symbolic representation, which exists in pre-verbal infants and in cultures that do not use symbols for counting (Dehaene, 2001, Feigenson et al., 2004). A growing body of experiments demonstrates that a wide range of animals possess a similar “number sense.” Not only birds (Nieder, 2018, Pepperberg, 2006, Rugani, 2018) and mammals (Matsuzawa, 2009, Nieder, 2018) or other large-brained animals but also fish, frogs/toads, and even insects with miniature brains were shown to be able to make decisions based on numerosity (reviewed in Agrillo and Bisazza, 2014, Agrillo and Bisazza, 2018, Pahl et al., 2013, Rose, 2018, Skorupski et al., 2018). Bees, in particular, exhibit counting-like abilities and can be trained to search for food after a given number of landmarks (Chittka and Geiger, 1995, Dacke and Srinivasan, 2008, Menzel et al., 2010) or on the stimulus with a given number of items (Skorupski et al., 2018), and can use the number of items as the decision criteria in a match-to-sample task (Gross et al., 2009).…”