>How do we know the bees don't simply use a learned lookup-table? Perhaps by reading the freely available original paper[0], where we find that the bees were t

>How do we know the bees don't simply use a learned lookup-table? Perhaps by reading the freely available original paper[0], where we find that the bees were tested on samples with randomized positions, and which included shapes previously unseen by bees. So the bees aren't using lookup tables to count. We all, though, use lookup tables to map numbers to single digits: that's by definition. The digit 7 represents this many objects: * * * * * *; you need to memorize this after you learn to count. The experiment doesn't establish the bees' ability to parse decimal notation (mapping numbers to character strings). [0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2019.0238 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2019...