Abstract
When counting-like abilities were first described in the honeybee in the mid-1990s, many scholars were sceptical, but such capacities have since been confirmed in a number of paradigms and also in other insect species. Counter to the intuitive notion that counting is a cognitively advanced ability, neural network analyses indicate that it can be mediated by very small neural circuits, and we should therefore perhaps not be surprised that insects and other small-brained animals such as some small fish exhibit such abilities. One outstanding question is how bees actually acquire numerical information. For perception of small numerosities, working-memory capacity may limit the number of items that can be enumerated, but within these limits, numerosity can be evaluated accurately and (at least in primates) in parallel. However, presentation of visual stimuli in parallel does not automatically ensure parallel processing. Recent work on the question of whether bees can see ‘at a glance’ indicates that bees must acquire spatial detail by sequential scanning rather than parallel processing. We explore how this might be tested for a numerosity task in bees and other animals.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The origins of numerical abilities’.
Highlights
‘Two tigers were seen going into the cave
It seems highly unlikely that the architectural plan of the vertebrate brain is necessary for basic numerical cognition; cuttlefish, for example, have recently been claimed to discriminate prey items on the basis of numerosity [5]
Contrary to the notion that numerical cognition is a complex, higher cortical function, theoretical studies indicate that numerical discrimination requires no more than a classifier and a threshold mechanism [6], which can be implemented by known neural circuits ([7]; see Rose [8])
Summary
‘Two tigers were seen going into the cave. Only one came out. Demonstrating any form of numerical competence in non-human animals requires tortuous controls, to rule out discrimination on the basis of some continuous magnitude rather than numerosity per se. These controls are required, but carry the implicit assumption that quantity discrimination is inherently more complex for countable rather than non-countable quantities, perhaps reflecting a higher cortical function. A promising avenue of future research might be to explore how animals such as insects solve numerosity tasks, which requires a detailed inspection of their choice behaviour rather than just tallying correct versus incorrect choices in discrimination tests Such an exploration might reveal that insects (and perhaps other animals) count by fundamentally different strategies, underpinned by different mechanisms, compared to humans. The need to acquire visual-spatial information by sequential scanning, rather than parallel processing of entire visual scenes, might require insects to inspect items one after another, and limit their ability to subitize (seeing numbers at a glance)
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