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This is the new bit, if you've already read about the basics of animal counting: > The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot tha

This is the new bit, if you've already read about the basics of animal counting: > The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex. (I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down.)

xcambar 5y ago
I agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph. I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article... Probably a bit of both, as always. That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, great tl;dr; ;)
- OJFord 5y ago
  Pet peeve?
  - xcambar 5y ago
    Oh no! Not a pet peeve! I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike! Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Why do you hate animal cognition ?
  - xcambar 5y ago
    Oh no! Not a pet peeve! I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike! Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  Saying "thank you" and upvoting is encouraging, and makes communities stronger. Blaming people is discouraging, and divides communities. Criticise the article, not the author, and thank the author for what they got right (a good topic for discussion) so they'll create more in future. We can also increase trust in the community using links. Mentioning names in a good way is particularly helpful, like academic citations. Thank you for finishing with the "great tl;dr", xcambar, you're asking the right questions :)
aksss 5y ago
You're doing God's work, sir.
User23 5y ago
How do we know this isn't another dead fish result?[1] I'm not trying to be dismissive, it's a real question that needs to be asked for any brain scan. [1] https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/ https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  That’s quite a funny application of noise thresholds. I wonder how much fMRI machines have improved since?
  - caddemon 5y ago
    fMRI machines are expensive as hell, most institutions share a few between multiple labs and even if they do get a new one don't decommission the old. IIRC the dead fish result had more to do with software than hardware though. My understanding is that the best of the best labs are careful with the analysis techniques applied, and they wouldn't have even made the dead fish mistake back then. The commonly used analysis tools are continually improved, so improvements may have propagated to the median fMRI group, but to be honest I still start out skeptical of most fMRI papers unless they're from a group I have prior reason to trust (or they include other data types besides just scans). Too many groups just apply the popular pipelines without an understanding of what they are doing, leading to misuse of tools. I'm tangential to the fMRI field though, so take with a grain of salt.
    - MichaelZuo 5y ago
      fMRI uses the highest powered MRI machines with perhaps slightly higher quality and calibration right? Has there been any improvement in the baseline quality once you exclude the dubious groups?
      - caddemon 5y ago
        TBH I'm not sure exactly what the hardware entails, I just work on the same floor as a couple labs that use the fMRI facilities so I know how much people stress over booking time on the machines. They somewhat recently added a new one that has stronger magnets but the older ones are still frequently booked solid too. From a neuroscience perspective I do think the good fMRI labs have improved their analyses over time. One thing increasing in popularity that has been helpful IMO is scanning the same participant across multiple days. It's a pain in the ass to get people to come back so it has generally been the norm to scan each participant in a study only once. But more powerful analysis techniques can be performed with these multi-scan datasets, as heterogeneity between and within individuals can be better accounted for. This review focuses on the default network, but it mentions how the discovery that the default network is actually multiple networks that were being blurred together was enabled by the multi-scan approach. It also gives a decent general gist of some of the things that have been reliably reported in fMRI research versus some things that are lacking, but mainly just from the perspective of questions about the default network: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31492945/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31492945/ I also like the following paper as a deep dive into the scans of a single person, because he splits apart some seemingly small things like having coffee/breakfast in the morning and shows the effect on scan results. I also think a multi-modal approach is really helpful, so I appreciate the other datatypes included. Plus it's kind of funny the PI wrote a paper entirely about himself: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9885 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9885 So yeah I think there is some self reflection and progress being made in the field in a meta sense, it just unfortunately can be drowned out (especially for people in other fields or even subfields of neuro) by the sheer popularity of shitting out fMRI papers.
wombatmobile 5y ago
This is the old bit > Some researchers, for example, propose that while humans have a “true” understanding of numerical concepts, animals only appear to be discriminating between groups of objects based on quantity when they’re instead relying on less abstract characteristics, like size or color. It's a cognitive bias. People have this because their model of the world is ego centric with themselves as hero and Number 1, and animals far below.
- crakenzak 5y ago
  I found the book Sapiens does wonders in shattering this objectively incorrect world view. We are alongside all other animals, with some skills much worse than other animals, some much better. Nothing more than that.
  - njarboe 5y ago
    I found the book "The Beginning of Infinity" shattered this objectively incorrect world view (and a few others). :)
  - notsureaboutpg 5y ago
    Reading Sapiens left me with exactly the opposite world view. At the end of the day, no animal in history has a history even close to the one written up in Sapiens.
  - philipov 5y ago
    There are some interesting ideas in Sapiens (which I've already been exposed to elsewhere) but I couldn't tolerate the breathless tone of the book. It was written in the same rhetorical style as one of those History Channel documentaries about how Aliens built the Pyramids.
  - MichaelEstes 5y ago
    I don't know if I'd call that objectively incorrect, maybe slightly pessimistic, but do you live in the US? A large percentage of people here were very ok with a smaller percentage of people dying so that their own lives wouldn't be inconvenienced, people have that world view even with their own species.
caddemon 5y ago
I don't see how mixing up a blank screen more often with one dot than with multiple dots indicates they think of "none" as a number. The more things there are the easier it is to detect at least one, so it seems completely plausible that something with a concept of "none" but without a concept of "zero" would also mix up no items with one more often than it would with two or three. Hopefully the original research addressed this, but it felt like the Quanta article was reporting the results in a way completely disconnected with the material it had just introduced. If we know the animals arrange quantities like a number line, why is there no report on where the animals place an empty set in that experiment? If we know that some young children don't understand the empty set can be a number, then why aren't results from young children on these tasks compared? There are some interesting results described, but I wasn't convinced at all by the argument about zero specifically, which they make a big deal of in the intro and discussion. To be honest I think Quanta is a bit overrated on HN in general, but that's another issue.
stormdennis 5y ago
>I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down. Me too, the title felt a little click-baitey

xcambar 5y ago

I agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph. I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article... Probably a bit of both, as always. That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, great tl;dr; ;)

OJFord 5y ago
Pet peeve?
- xcambar 5y ago
  Oh no! Not a pet peeve! I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike! Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D
edgyquant 5y ago
Why do you hate animal cognition ?
- xcambar 5y ago
  Oh no! Not a pet peeve! I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike! Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D
peterburkimsher 5y ago
Saying "thank you" and upvoting is encouraging, and makes communities stronger. Blaming people is discouraging, and divides communities. Criticise the article, not the author, and thank the author for what they got right (a good topic for discussion) so they'll create more in future. We can also increase trust in the community using links. Mentioning names in a good way is particularly helpful, like academic citations. Thank you for finishing with the "great tl;dr", xcambar, you're asking the right questions :)

aksss 5y ago

You're doing God's work, sir.

User23 5y ago

How do we know this isn't another dead fish result?[1] I'm not trying to be dismissive, it's a real question that needs to be asked for any brain scan. [1] https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/ https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

MichaelZuo 5y ago
That’s quite a funny application of noise thresholds. I wonder how much fMRI machines have improved since?
- caddemon 5y ago
  fMRI machines are expensive as hell, most institutions share a few between multiple labs and even if they do get a new one don't decommission the old. IIRC the dead fish result had more to do with software than hardware though. My understanding is that the best of the best labs are careful with the analysis techniques applied, and they wouldn't have even made the dead fish mistake back then. The commonly used analysis tools are continually improved, so improvements may have propagated to the median fMRI group, but to be honest I still start out skeptical of most fMRI papers unless they're from a group I have prior reason to trust (or they include other data types besides just scans). Too many groups just apply the popular pipelines without an understanding of what they are doing, leading to misuse of tools. I'm tangential to the fMRI field though, so take with a grain of salt.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    fMRI uses the highest powered MRI machines with perhaps slightly higher quality and calibration right? Has there been any improvement in the baseline quality once you exclude the dubious groups?
    - caddemon 5y ago
      TBH I'm not sure exactly what the hardware entails, I just work on the same floor as a couple labs that use the fMRI facilities so I know how much people stress over booking time on the machines. They somewhat recently added a new one that has stronger magnets but the older ones are still frequently booked solid too. From a neuroscience perspective I do think the good fMRI labs have improved their analyses over time. One thing increasing in popularity that has been helpful IMO is scanning the same participant across multiple days. It's a pain in the ass to get people to come back so it has generally been the norm to scan each participant in a study only once. But more powerful analysis techniques can be performed with these multi-scan datasets, as heterogeneity between and within individuals can be better accounted for. This review focuses on the default network, but it mentions how the discovery that the default network is actually multiple networks that were being blurred together was enabled by the multi-scan approach. It also gives a decent general gist of some of the things that have been reliably reported in fMRI research versus some things that are lacking, but mainly just from the perspective of questions about the default network: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31492945/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31492945/ I also like the following paper as a deep dive into the scans of a single person, because he splits apart some seemingly small things like having coffee/breakfast in the morning and shows the effect on scan results. I also think a multi-modal approach is really helpful, so I appreciate the other datatypes included. Plus it's kind of funny the PI wrote a paper entirely about himself: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9885 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9885 So yeah I think there is some self reflection and progress being made in the field in a meta sense, it just unfortunately can be drowned out (especially for people in other fields or even subfields of neuro) by the sheer popularity of shitting out fMRI papers.

wombatmobile 5y ago

This is the old bit > Some researchers, for example, propose that while humans have a “true” understanding of numerical concepts, animals only appear to be discriminating between groups of objects based on quantity when they’re instead relying on less abstract characteristics, like size or color. It's a cognitive bias. People have this because their model of the world is ego centric with themselves as hero and Number 1, and animals far below.

crakenzak 5y ago
I found the book Sapiens does wonders in shattering this objectively incorrect world view. We are alongside all other animals, with some skills much worse than other animals, some much better. Nothing more than that.
- njarboe 5y ago
  I found the book "The Beginning of Infinity" shattered this objectively incorrect world view (and a few others). :)
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  Reading Sapiens left me with exactly the opposite world view. At the end of the day, no animal in history has a history even close to the one written up in Sapiens.
- philipov 5y ago
  There are some interesting ideas in Sapiens (which I've already been exposed to elsewhere) but I couldn't tolerate the breathless tone of the book. It was written in the same rhetorical style as one of those History Channel documentaries about how Aliens built the Pyramids.
- MichaelEstes 5y ago
  I don't know if I'd call that objectively incorrect, maybe slightly pessimistic, but do you live in the US? A large percentage of people here were very ok with a smaller percentage of people dying so that their own lives wouldn't be inconvenienced, people have that world view even with their own species.

caddemon 5y ago

I don't see how mixing up a blank screen more often with one dot than with multiple dots indicates they think of "none" as a number. The more things there are the easier it is to detect at least one, so it seems completely plausible that something with a concept of "none" but without a concept of "zero" would also mix up no items with one more often than it would with two or three. Hopefully the original research addressed this, but it felt like the Quanta article was reporting the results in a way completely disconnected with the material it had just introduced. If we know the animals arrange quantities like a number line, why is there no report on where the animals place an empty set in that experiment? If we know that some young children don't understand the empty set can be a number, then why aren't results from young children on these tasks compared? There are some interesting results described, but I wasn't convinced at all by the argument about zero specifically, which they make a big deal of in the intro and discussion. To be honest I think Quanta is a bit overrated on HN in general, but that's another issue.

stormdennis 5y ago

>I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down. Me too, the title felt a little click-baitey