Slashdot Mirror
Many Animals Can Count, Some Better Than You (nytimes.com)
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.
...if we take away the puppy.
You morons would vote for a frog, especially one that can count.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
FTA:
The speed and accuracy with which a bitcoin investor and be distinguished from a normal investor is the same as the speed at which the valuation of the investment changes over time.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
After four it doesn't really matter.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
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.
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?
Basic human counting ability. See book by George Gamow. Can be extended with some effort through education.
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.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Lion 1: There's a pack of hyenas headed our way!
Lion 2: How many strong are they?
Lion 1: A Lot -- I couldn't count
Lion 2: You should've counted the number of legs and divided by four...
In what way? I think their economy is way more stable than ours.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Their economy looks fairly good for a country their size.
And that is an outdated offensive statement.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Seems even animals are better at noticing 22 is less than 26 than you are. Maybe next time get a spider or fish to help you out.
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?
Sayz a Mac Nac Feegle.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
And yet people are terrible at math.
A hungry cat has no snooze button.
How to piss off a frog...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
One... and one more one.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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 :-(
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.