My cat certainly knows when there is zero food in his bowl.
Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
101–110 of 165 posts
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#102The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…
> Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works
I'm not sure I see that, that is, the "understanding" part. I mean, this is not some new kind of behavior, even if everyone here reacts with surprise. Anyone with a pet dog or cat knows the various mischief they can get into. Many of us have been at the beach and watched seagulls do all sorts of interesting stuff. Animals aren't "dumb" and I don't know anyone who would say that they are. What people do object to is the unwarranted inference that because they display what looks like clever behavior then this must entail capacity for abstract thought with concepts. I don't see how abstraction is necessary in these examples at all. Language in the fullest sense demonstrates the existence of abstract thought. Non-human language does not appear to show any sign of descriptive and argumentative function, only signalling and expression (in the Popperian sense).
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one impressed me so much, I never looked at Crows again the same way: "Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?" https://youtu.be/cbSu2PXOTOc
They are smart but TBH that crow already did all the sub-puzzles independently, he knew what the possible moves are just had to execute them in some order.
To be fair, that's how most of us approach puzzle games. "Okay I've learnt the individual tricks, now let me just try piecing them together in the order that they become available."
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was this horse named Clever Hans whose trick was that you could give him a math problem and he would tap out the answer with his hoof. Of course, his powers were fake, but the way he actually did it is brilliant. When the number of taps approached the correct answer, his trainer became excited. Hans picked up on this and stopped right when the trainer's excitement reached its peak. The trainer had no idea this…
And there’s that famous computer vision story of a model that was supposed to detect tanks in images but actually just detected whether or not it was sunny (all the tank pictures in the training set were sunny, non tanks overcast). Children will make similar classification errors when learning too. None of this means that it’s not possible they can also learn counting, but just that scientists need to be clever about…
The tank story is urban legend.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#105There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head. They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice. Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”. The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.…
A dog I live with, not technically mine, can count to at least three. She hates waiting in her harness before we go on walks, and has learned that I am ready to go after taking three poop bags. If I only pull two bags, she won’t come downstairs and wait by the door. If I pull the third bag, she immediately walks down the stairs. I noticed it the other day because I had two bags on me; so, she only heard me pull one b…
This reaction to quantity does not imply the concept of number.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#106The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…
90% of communication for humans is body language and sensory cues.
It’s not hard for me to see how our language faculty convinced past humans we were somehow masters of reality beyond other creatures.
Past humans did pass on a lot of dumb ideas.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#107This 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…
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, grea…
Pet peeve?
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#108There's a difference between having the concept of number and reacting to quantities or having expectations that are unmet. There is no need for abstract concepts. All animals (in the phylogenetic sense) other than ourselves perceive reality utterly concretely. I am not sure how these brain scans are supposed to really show otherwise.
Show me an animal that can describe and argue and you will have my attention. For now, I only see signalling and expression, but no language showing signs of description and argumentation.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
A dog I live with, not technically mine, can count to at least three. She hates waiting in her harness before we go on walks, and has learned that I am ready to go after taking three poop bags. If I only pull two bags, she won’t come downstairs and wait by the door. If I pull the third bag, she immediately walks down the stairs. I noticed it the other day because I had two bags on me; so, she only heard me pull one b…
This reaction to quantity does not imply the concept of number.
Surely it implies an ability to count incrementally, which is all OP was implying? The dog does not have to abstract the concept of '3' to be able to count- it's still very interesting.
Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
#110This 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…
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.