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."

Comments

Who would have thought

[qoncept]

They also stress the fundamentals of basketball even though they no can dunk.

Alternate hypothesis

[srussia]

They can smell plastic/chocolate residue really good.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[RyoShin]

This was my thought (except I doubt they used the actual chocolate containers). The smell of plastic is probably overwhelming in a lab, though, so more likely than not their own smell(s) were all over the containers due to spending so much time around them, and they just followed whichever smell was stronger.

The way to test for this would be to secretly replace the containers with 'placebo' ones that have no smell, and then see if the pattern repeats. That would control for the possibility of them sniffing their way over.

It's still an interesting conclusion (seeking out their own smell), but not one with the same implications if true.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[fuo]

It also doesn't way what order everything was done in... If there are 3 balls behind screen A and 2 balls behind Screen B and they moved the 3rd ball to screen A last, then maybe the chick just went to the LAST ball it saw move.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[DMUTPeregrine]

The problem is that most birds are already known to have very poor senses of smell. Chickens included. So it seems unlikely that they would be smelling plastic from behind the screens that accurately and that far away.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[CrimsonAvenger]

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.

There have been experiments of that sort with crows.

Apparently crows can keep track of the number of people inside till more than seven go in. After eight or more are inside, if seven leave they behave as if the blind is empty, suggesting very strongly that they can count to seven.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[Chris Burke]

Yeah? Well vultures have great senses of smell. Maybe these were vulture chicks. I bet the scientists didn't think of that! I'm so smart.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[Chyeld]

Ok then, the study wasn't flawed.

They did attempt several methods of 'throwing' the chicks off. It didn't work.

There was no 'trail' for the chicks to follow.

They accounted for the "maybe they just 'sensed' where the most eggs are", they covered their bases.

If you had actually read about the study rather than spouting bullshit based on the summary, you'd have known that.

In a series of simple maths tests, Rugani's team attached a fishing line to each of the plastic capsules and used it to move them behind two screens that the chick could see from behind a clear plastic door. When all of the containers had been hidden, the chick was set free to investigate.

Rugani's team found that when the chicks went in search of the capsules, they peered first behind the screen that concealed the larger number of containers.

In a more difficult test, the researchers moved the containers back and forth behind the two screens while the chicks watched. When they were released into the enclosure, the chicks still made 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.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[tonyreadsnews]

That's because most cows only have a 1 byte counter in them.

You have to get the ones that were abducted (but not eaten) by aliens which have been upgraded.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[Anonymous Coward]

A one byte counter would get them to 255, I believe you mean a 3 bit counter.

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[Hatta]

I wonder if they distinguish between a little more than 7 and a lot more than 7. If you sent 40 people into the blind, and had 7 come out, would they still think it's empty?

Re:Alternate hypothesis

[try_anything]

Or, instead of counting, perhaps the chicks maintained a rough mental estimate of how much "parent stuff" was behind each screen. With only five balls, about 20% of the "stuff" moved each time a ball moved, so it's not clear why counting would be necessary to pick the right screen. The interesting thing about counting is that it's discrete and precise, perhaps even symbolic, instead of a rough estimate of continuous quantity. By not explaining how the researchers proved that distinction, the BBC article left out the only thing that makes the experiment interesting. Quite disappointing.

Chic(k) computing

[Bovius]

If these guys were programmers, in 6 months we'd have a baby chick Turing machine up and running.

Re:Chic(k) computing

[JustOK]

Yah, like geeks can get any type of chick, Turing or otherwise, turned on.

Re:Chic(k) computing

[jgtg32a]

Hopefully these guys work out better than ducklings, because it was too easy to get stuck in inf loops with ducklings

http://xkcd.com/537/

Don't forget.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the researchers fail to consider is this experiment's youtube Adorability Factor.

That's nothing

[Centurix]

We have duck called Mersenne that quacks in primes.

This calls for something.

[A. B3ttik]

Who else could go for a bucket of KFC right about now?

Re:This calls for something.

[CannonballHead]

I don't see what real, actual chickens have to do with KFC. ;)

Re:Chic(k) computing, oblig

[JamesP]

Imagine a bewolf cluster of these.

And if you need more power, you just need to pick up more chicks.

Hot chicks are good at math?

[GPLDAN]

Did somebody say hot chicks? That are good at math?

I knew you Slashdot guys were cool...

cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

can they count before they're hatched?

Interesting

[shellster_dude]

They seem to have about as much grasp of math as some one the chicks in my last calculus class.

Next experiment...

[ajlitt]

Convince the chicks to put the containers in the incinerator.

News flash

[momerath2003]

Chicks dig math. Slashdot rejoices until they RTFA.

Re:News flash

[Kyont]

Slashdot rejoices until they RTFA.

So... the rejoicing continued indefinitely?

Seems like a jump to conclusions.

[Beelzebud]

What's to say the chicks just aren't recognizing a simple pattern? Just because they could see that the larger group had moved from one side to the other doesn't mean they were counting, it just means they recognize the pattern, and went to the one they were familiar with.

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.

Re:Is this really "counting"

[MozeeToby]

In the final part of the experiment, the put screens up in front of the two groups so the chicks couldn't see them, then moved balls back and forth between the groups letting the chicks see how many were being moved each time. The chicks were able to keep track of how many were in each pile based on how many had moved from one to the other. That seems to indicate not just counting and greater than/less than but also addition and subtraction.

Unless of course they just went to the smelliest pile like many people have speculated.

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: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)

Why no Kinder eggs in the USA

[tepples]

Kinder Surprise isn't sold in the United States because FDA food safety regulations prohibit the importation or sale of candy that encloses something inedible. The closest counterpart in the United States is probably Wonder Ball, a Nestle product with hard candy inside a hollow ball of milk chocolate.

Re:Why no Kinder eggs in the USA

[smellsofbikes]

>1938? I wonder what the real intent of this law was.

It was probably part of the ongoing reaction to the publication of Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle", where he documented/alleged pretty horrific working conditions and product control in the Chicago meatpacking industry, all of which were later factually verified by federal investigators except for his claim that workers who fell into boiling rendering tanks were left there and their rendered fat sold along with the cattle fat. (And that was after the meatpacking companies were warned that they were going to be inspected, and had cleaned up.)
Also, the banning of 'non-nutritive items' is not actually a ban but a threshold: there is an acceptable quantity of insect parts allowed in foods. (Since the raw materials have insect parts, that's pretty much unavoidable, no matter how much some safety-obsessed people natter on about it.)
However, in the 1800's and early 1900's, it was common to pad foodstuffs with anything that was cheap and added weight: plaster, ground-up horsehair, you name it. It's really no different than last year's Chinese melamine scare.
Sinclair's book is why the FDA came into being, by the way: public demand for government regulation of foodstuffs. When companies were self-regulating, they dumped in some pretty amazing things to keep their profit margins high and satisfy consumer demand as cheaply as possible. Many foodstuffs were dyed to match consumer expectations, using cheap, known-toxic dyes. I believe copper/arsenic salts were used to color American-made absinthe, for instance.

As for Kinder eggs, the italian restaurant down the street has boxes of them. My girlfriend loves them. There was a period two years ago where all they could get was kinders with plastic shells with the toys beside the chocolate -- presumably as legal imports -- but now they've gone back to the original stuff with the chocolate outsides and the labelling all in German. We went to a grocery store specializing in Balkan stuff a while back and got some ripoff Kinders -- they looked similar, but they tasted like gubmint chocolate (burnt) and had really crappy toys.

Something similary about cockroaches long ago...

[Chris Burke]

Some years ago an experiment appeared on /. where they tested how roaches would hide in shelters. Roaches naturally like to hide in the biggest groups that they can. The researchers found that if they put 50 roaches into an enclosure, and put two shelters in the enclosure, one that could hold 50 and one that could hold 40, all the roaches would pile into the big enclosure. If they put two enclosures that could hold 40, the roaches would split into two groups of very close to half (like 26 and 24) in the two enclosures, with roaches actually moving from one to the other in order to balance it out.

Not counting, but it did demonstrate they had some notion of group size and size equivalence, and that they considered more than their own benefit (otherwise a roach would not have left an enclosure that could have held more roaches), possibly even communicating to do so.

It's weird how smart animals with tiny tiny brains can be.

False assumption?

[memorycardfull]

Associating a certain screen with more incidents of objects recently disappearing behind them doesn't necessarily indicate the ability to add or subtract. The idea that moving the objects back and forth is confusing to the chicks and thus requires math to sort out the answer might be a false assumption. If the chick is responding to the stimulus of objects disappearing behind a screen, and the effect of the stimulus is cumulative as more objects disappear behind the screen and the effect of this stimulus is strongest for the most recent stimuli and decreases over time I think that the result would be what is observed in the experiment. I think what is more interesting about this experiment is that the chicks have an innate sense of object permanence which is an ability human beings are not born with.

Re:False assumption?

[memorycardfull]

I am loathe to reply to my own comment, but I believe that my conclusion that the experiment indicates that chicks have an innate sense object permanence rests on false assumptions as well. I would just like to retract that for the sake of consistency.

Re:False assumption?

[TinBromide]

True, if chickens flock, then there's a safety in numbers instinct going on as well. There may not be math, but an egg moving behind screen A means that screen A has more safety warm and fuzzies than screen B. As more eggs move behind either screen A or screen B, they might get more fuzzies associated with either screen. However, and this is the big assumption made, while we clearly differentiate between math and warm and fuzzies or a desire to go somewhere, the chickens may be processing with a flock mentality based on warm and fuzzies as the operators and object permanence as the variable storage.

Re:False assumption?

[rpillala]

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

!News

[Thelasko]

It's already proven that chicks can do math.

They're still food

[gregthebunny]

delicious > "innate skill"

Re:Is that technically addition and subtraction?

[LordKronos]

It says the containers were placed behind screens. The chicks were able to see them moving between screens, but were not able to see how many were behind the screens. Thus their instinct to go to the larger group can only kick in if they know which group is larger. If they can't see the groups, then the only way they can know which is larger is to count and remember, or to use some other sense.

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:My Dog Can Do Calculus

[Have Brain Will Rent]

My dog can do calculus too. Unfortunately he is afflicted with paranoia so he just lets it hit the floor and gives it good looking over before he decides to put it in his mouth. Then he catches it the second time. LOL.

My previous one was a wolf-hybrid and she could tell if it was something she wanted to put in her mouth while the object was in flight - even with something the size of half a pea and moving fast she would always make the correct choice, 100% percent of the time. That always amazed me. That and that she could do this and still catch the object even if the trajectory took it quite a distance from her original position. I think we grossly underestimate the processing power of these animals. My guess would be that in their own domain, a reasonably smart dog (hey some are dumb as bricks) is the equivalent of a 2-3 year old human.

Now, for the rest of the story...

[BForrester]

...but what about baby dudes?

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.