Baby Chicks Have Innate Mathematical Skills

Hugh Pickens writes "Chicks can add and subtract small numbers shortly after hatching, says Rosa Rugani at the University of Trento. Rugani reared chicks with five plastic containers of the kind found inside Kinder chocolate eggs. This meant the chicks bonded with the capsules, much as they do with their mother, making them want to be near the containers as they grew up. In one test, the researchers moved the containers back and forth behind two screens while the chicks watched. When the chicks were released into the enclosure, they headed for the screen obscuring the most containers, suggesting they had been able to keep track of the number of capsules behind each by adding and subtracting them as they moved. It is already known that many non-human primates and monkeys can count, and even domestic dogs have been found to be capable of simple additions but this is the first time the ability has been seen in such young animals, and with no prior training in problem solving of any kind."

Alternate hypothesis

[srussia]

They can smell plastic/chocolate residue really good.

Is this really "counting"

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Or are the chicks simply recognizing "more" rather than "fewer" or "less"?

Re:Is this really "counting"

[SatanicPuppy]

The difference is semantic. Obviously they're not doing arithmetic as we usually think of it, but if they're able to keep track of shifting quantities that's math.

They're still food

[gregthebunny]

delicious > "innate skill"

Bad science.

[DaveV1.0]

This does not show that chicks can add and subtract. All this shows is that chicks have some concept of more and most. That is all.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[CarpetShark]

Yep, I thought the same at first. Now though, I'm thinking there are probably a ton of possibilities: other chicks in an earlier, botched, non-double-blind experiment went that way, and left some kind of trail, the researchers laid out the experiment in some way that gave the chicks a clue...

I don't doubt for a second that most animals can count small numbers, although birdwatchers have been known to run in and out of hides to confuse birds about how many people are left inside. But I'm really sick of seeing all these flawed experiments that jump to flawed conclusions. Most of these "scientists" probably get into science because they're too proud to be the hairdresser they always wanted to be.

Re:Seems like a jump to conclusions.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like you do when you count? All we as humans are doing is recognizing a pattern and assigning a mapping to it (nothing special about the numerals 1, 2, 3, ...), they might as well be chicken-scratching.

My Dog Can Do Calculus

[Rude Turnip]

Whenever I throw something and my dog catches it, he's inherently working out the position of the object and its velocity in order to catch it.

Re:False assumption?

[rpillala]

Isn't this accumulation of stimuli the way counting works?

Chicks can count but do they know that they can?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, chicks can count eggs. And dogs who catch Frisbies can do calculus.

But neither example means they are able to reflect on the logical basis by which their brains compute solutions to either problems.

Re:Is this really "counting"

[penguinbroker]

The difference is not just semantics. If they are making decisions based on qualitative notions (more) as opposed to quantitative (2 more) then it is a difference between doing discrete mathematics vs. reacting to an analog signal. The latter of which is not what we normally consider math, at least in terms of the subject's thought process.

It would be interesting to use different sized eggs to create scenarios where one group has more individual eggs but the other group has a higher total surface area (maybe volume) of eggs. If the chicks still chose the group with more individual eggs than one could make a strong case that they are capable of counting.

Re:Bad science.

[SydShamino]

And how do they know how many is more when they can't see them?

Move five behind screen A. Move two over to behind screen B. Chick can't see any of them, but decides to go to screen A.

Move five behind screen A. Move three over to behind screen B. Chick can't see any of them, but decides to go to screen B.

Repeat for more complicated patterns and more moves before the chick is freed to move.

The only way they could know that there are more behind a screen is to sense them (and chickens have poor senses of smell and no ESP) or to have made mental adjustments of "more" and "most" based on movement of items. And that's addition and subtraction.

Re:Is this really "counting"

[profplump]

In the general sense, the ability to determine that A > B requires arithmetic. Without arithmetic you could only look at two piles and say "they both contain many items"; the ability to say "pile A contains more items than pile B" requires some form of arithmetic, even if it is very simply.

And I'm not sure where you got this idea that arithmetic is purely discrete. For the purposes of calculation we often treat our observations that way, but in reality most arithmetic involves quantities that were not determined exactly. It's only our abstractions that allow counting in the first place -- "car" is not a measurable unit, it's an abstraction that we use to categories and describe our environment, and it's only such abstractions that can be discretely counted in the first place.

That's not to say that the birds were counting discrete plastic containers, as opposed to identifying the set of containers with the most visible surface, but in either case if the birds can determine that one set has "more" of something than the other set, it's still basic arithmetic. (And as always it's certainly possible that "more" had nothing to do with their behavior, and that the birds were motivated by something that the experiment did not control against, but that's beyond the scope of this comment)