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Science

Many Animals Can Count, Some Better Than You (nytimes.com) 61

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: The story of the frog's neuro-abacus is just one example of nature's vast, ancient and versatile number sense, a talent explored in detail in a recent themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, edited by Brian Butterworth, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, C. Randy Gallistel of Rutgers University and Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trento. Scientists have found that animals across the evolutionary spectrum have a keen sense of quantity, able to distinguish not just bigger from smaller or more from less, but two from four, four from ten, forty from sixty. Orb-weaving spiders, for example, keep a tally of how many silk-wrapped prey items are stashed in the "larder" segment of their web. When scientists experimentally remove the cache, the spiders will spend time searching for the stolen goods in proportion to how many separate items had been taken, rather than how big the total prey mass might have been. Small fish benefit from living in schools, and the more numerous the group, the statistically better a fish's odds of escaping predation. As a result, many shoaling fish are excellent appraisers of relative head counts.
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Many Animals Can Count, Some Better Than You More

Many Animals Can Count, Some Better Than You

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  • Let's See What Happens... (Score:3)

    by JohnPerkins ( 243021 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:33AM (#56083525) Homepage

    ...if we take away the puppy.

  • Cats can't count, though (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:43AM (#56083579)

    One of my ex-wife's cats was a bit mean - she'd do things she knew she wasn't supposed to, like knocking things off bookcase shelves.

    But only when no one was watching...

    My ex and I heard this damn cat misbehaving one day, and we both walked into the living room to find her knocking books down. She stopped, acted all innocent, and started grooming herself.

    My ex walked out of the room - I stood perfectly still. That little fucker watched my ex leave then jumped into the bookcase and returned to knocking things down.

    I shouted, "Hey!" and I got this "Where the hell did you come from!" surprised look from that damn cat.

    Cats can't count to two.

    • Re:Cats can't count, though (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:00AM (#56083689)

      He knew you were there - you were just irrelevant - and you yelled and startled him. And his look was 'who the fuck do you think YOU are - you pathetic inferior being! I AM a cat! YOU are nothing but a bald ape!'

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hetero ( 5159127 )
        THIS [youtube.com] is what you put in the room to discipline cats. I guarantee you you'd never have that problem again.

    • One of my ex-wife's cats was a bit mean - she'd do things she knew she wasn't supposed to, like knocking things off bookcase shelves.

      But only when no one was watching...

      Cat's aren't stupid. They know when they do things that piss you off- and will frequently do it when you're not looking. When I first graduated University, I got a small flat and a cat. The cat love destroying the blinds, she also knew I didn't love it when she destroyed the blinds. She quickly learnt to do it only when I wasn't home... or I was in bed.

      She knew, if she smashed up the blinds in the kitchen whilst I was on the computer in the bedroom I'd come and tell her off... so she didn't. She also k

      • Re:Cats can't count, though (Score:5, Interesting)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:25AM (#56083909)
        Cats generally don't do things like this if you spend a little bit of time playing with them or exercising them. I once had a cat that liked to get up to all kinds of similarly mischievous deeds until I eventually figured out that it was just bored. After spending 20 minutes having it chase around a toy mouse on a string or a laser pointer, it wouldn't engage in other types of destructive behavior.

        Cats don't need a lot of attention. They're more than happy to spend most of a day sleeping or lying in the sun. However, they are predators and are wired to stalk, chase prey, etc. Satisfy those behavioral needs and they're not going to go around trying to find other ways to scratch those itches. It also makes the cat a lot more friendly towards you as well.

        • Cats generally don't do things like this if you spend a little bit of time playing with them or exercising them. I once had a cat that liked to get up to all kinds of similarly mischievous deeds until I eventually figured out that it was just bored. After spending 20 minutes having it chase around a toy mouse on a string or a laser pointer, it wouldn't engage in other types of destructive behavior.

          Cats don't need a lot of attention. They're more than happy to spend most of a day sleeping or lying in the sun. However, they are predators and are wired to stalk, chase prey, etc. Satisfy those behavioral needs and they're not going to go around trying to find other ways to scratch those itches. It also makes the cat a lot more friendly towards you as well.

          Oh, this one got a lot of attention! I still have her actually, she's 20 years old now (she doesn't get as much attention now though because she is always asleep). I used to call he psycho kitty because when she was young we used to play this game where I would peak around a corner at her repeatedly... and then she'd come death-charge me... I would run and she would leap onto my leg like a lion trying to take down a wildebeest. In summer when I wore shorts I regretted playing that game with her... when

    • Re:Cats can't count, though (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:28AM (#56083923)
      I know a number of guys who got a bonus-cat with a relationship. They tend to have accidents far from home. However, in my favorite case, my buddy got blamed for disappearing a worthless misbehaving cat but he pled innocent. He really had no idea what happened to ol' Frisky until one day a fireman came up to the door with an animal control officer. They related that they'd just raided the nest of an owl and found about two dozen cat collars. His wife's cat had been nailed at about 180 MPH from the sky by a big owl and learned she wasn't quite as tough as she was when she was scratching and biting everyone in the household. Talons + beak > domesticated claws + teeth.

    • I think the cat realized that you were merely the number two human in the house.

    • sounds like the cat was just slightly ahead of the ex as far as determining your relevance goes? :)

  • Do animals count?

    Yes, they do. That's why we enacted endangered species act and we donate money to World Wildlife Fund and other organizations that have logos of cute cuddly animals.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      Wasted? Understanding how brains handle mathematical functions useless?

      You must not be able to count the ways the research can be beneficial.

  • Pointless trivia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @10:50AM (#56083627) Homepage Journal

    I have a pair of very large monitor lizards that can count.
    They know when feeding time is (Pavlovian learned response no doubt there) and if I give them, each, 10 food items, they are happy.
    If I give one 9, and the other 11 for example, the one with 11 will eat 10 and leave the other one. The one with 9, will hunt for a 10th food item, and won't stop until he finds something to eat.
    This happens regardless of food item size (to a point, they cannot eat 10 full sized rabbits, for example, but 10 rats is easy to do)

  • FTA:

    non-human minds obey Weber's Law, which is the oldest and most broadly applicable quantitative law in experimental psychology. It says that the discriminability of two quantities—the speed and accuracy with which the larger of the two can be decided on—depends only on the ratio of the two objectively specified quantities. Thus, for example, the speed and accuracy with which a 6 g weight can be distinguished from a 4 g weight are the same as the speed and accuracy with which a 6 kg weight can

  • After four it doesn't really matter.

  • Animal Psych (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:15AM (#56083821)
    I took an animal psych class back in college and at the time it was believed that most animals could count to at least 7 linearly, and beyond that were excellent at estimating logarithmically. The smarter the animal, the further it could count linearly, in general.

  • Counting Crows (Score:3)

    by fox171171 ( 1425329 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:18AM (#56083839)
    Heard a story many years ago about crows. Food on the ground, but they would not come down because of a nearby group of people. The group walked behind a building and out the other side and walked away. When they left one of the group behind the building, and the crows would not come down. When nobody stayed behind the building, they came down for the food. Did the crows count the people?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Possibly.
      Other research has sugested that crows can also identify and recall individual humans. They might have noticed the individual hadn't been observed leaving rather than noticing the change in the group's quantity while out of sight.

      The two cases are similar enough it's be pretty hard to distinguish without a specially designed experament.
      In fact some of the others listed here like the spider could also be explained by recognizing the individuals rather than counting the quantity in the set.

    • I've had few interactions with crows but witnessed a few glimpses of their famous intelligence. One afternoon I was in the back yard and heard very unusual crow calls, which is telling since usually their calls already sound unnervingly like a human conversation in a language you don't know. Two crows were coordinating with one another to harass a young red tail hawk into leaving the area. The hawk was of course better suited for combat, but the crows were interspersing generic calls of aggression with s

    • The corvid family (Crows, Ravens, Magpies) are extremely intelligent, more so than most mammals. Most likely they did.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Recent research has shown that bird brains have a much higher neuron density than mammal brains, most prominently in the forebrain, so even though their brains are much smaller they are more 'optimized' and can therefor reach the same complexity as that of much larger animals like primates. See for example http://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255.full

  • I've also found it interesting how some animals are capable of knowing names for foods, people and other animals. It doesn't seem to be something they'd have a use for in the wild. If they had a label for "wolf", "lion", "human" researchers should have found them by now. Yet being around people they can easily accept labels. Always cool to find abilities they have that we haven't really noticed.

  • Not with symbology like numbers, mind you.. (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @12:00PM (#56084167) Journal
    So I'm thinking that within a non-sentient/pre-sentient brain, this 'counting' process works, neurologically-speaking, like an op-amp integrator circuit, with a comparator-tree watching the output? The voltage accumulation reaches certain threshold values, trips the associated comparator? Then of course there's someting analogous to the 'reset' switch on the capacitor in the feedback loop?

  • Cat Clock (Score:3)

    by Zorro ( 15797 ) on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @02:34PM (#56085229)

    A hungry cat has no snooze button.

  • When I show my dog 4 matches, he taps the ground twice and stops. So I try more, 9 ; and he taps 3 times. Then tried 100 matches, he tapped only 10 times. My last try was 256, but he only tapped 16 times. That dog doesn't count right :-(

  • An interesting article. I cannot help but compare it to humans. We have at least one subgroup that survived to modernity (the Pirahã) who cannot count.

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