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Do the birds and the bees actually count? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a
by pmdulaney 5y ago
Do the birds and the bees actually count? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually counting them.
Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actually empty.
- wavefunction 5y agoBut then what is counting? Is it what we (humans, birds and bees) use to abstract reality?
- pmdulaney 5y agoFor us humans it is a process of establishing a one-to-one relationship between objects and a long-since-memorized sequence of words that requires just one member of the sequence to be remembered in order to represent the number of objects.
- wavefunction 5y agoI think that's part of it to be sure. However I can readily account nine items versus ten items depending on how they are organized. We are counting when we are enumerating, however that occurs in man, bird or bee it seems to me.
- uuddlrlr 5y agoThere's a term for it but I can't easily find it. https://neurosciencenews.com/neuron-counting-9898/ https://neurosciencenews.com/neuron-counting-9898/ This article goes into it and mentions "numerical distance effect", which looks appropriate but not what I remember. I did learn that people who play first person shooters can usually recognize more objects at once instantly; 6 or 7 instead of a more typical 4 or 5, if I recall correctly. They used number of grapes in a hand to measure.