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Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#131

Post by MichaelEstes »

crakenzak wrote: post #118
wombatmobile wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#132

Post by caddemon »

abecedarius wrote: post #79

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…

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.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#133

Post by sellyme »

srean wrote: post #72
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they're thinking "zero" but just don't have the word for it. I.e. what if this is just a linguistic deficit? Please err on the side of me understanding your question well.

Even the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate. My personal take is that its possible, predators plan ambush, but do they have a linguistic representation ? Its not clear that they do.

> Even the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate.

This seems fairly trivially true just based on how common it is for someone to have 100% full understanding of a concept and then be completely incapable of remembering the word describing it, or even a phrase that conveys a decent approximation.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#134

Post by Jake_Barnes »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #49
agumonkey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crows do team work to figure out machines monkeys can team up to resolve non trivial coordinated tasks (vaguely related: gorillas still have the zero lag face recognition) beside not speaking, often when I look at animals, it feels that they got wiser than us.. they could do more smart things but they just coast.

To expand on your mention of crows. Not only do crows learn to recognize PEOPLE by their FACES, they teach their offspring to avoid/mistrust those same people. Those offspring teach their offspring. So the "grandchild" of the original bird learns to avoid a specific person. *(Note the documentary I watched with this revelation didn't follow any further generations. We don't know how many generations are taught this l…

YES! I am pretty sure I have watched the same documentary! It was the one that a town hired a falconer to try to get rid of a murder of crows that had decided to move in?

That documentary was so interesting(in my opinion at least). I think it might be on Youtube, but I don't remember the name.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#135

Post by MichaelZuo »

caddemon wrote: post #125
MichaelZuo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s quite a funny application of noise thresholds. I wonder how much fMRI machines have improved since?

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 analysi…

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?

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#136

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

fsckboy wrote: post #88
burnished wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, judeo-christianity? Western societies viewpoints on human intelligence and how it relates to animal intelligence for centuries? The notion, typically, is that while humans are animals our intelligence is not just different in degree but different in kind. I think it comes from that bit in the bible where their god places humans as above all other life forms, just a guess though.

you're telling me what I know, where I'm asking about the commenter's claim that there are cultures that do NOT do this

It's not quite the same thing as "intelligence", but in "Braiding Sweetgrass" Robin Wall Kimmerer describes how (at least) several native American cultures ascribe great wisdom to the trees, since they've been here longer, and regard human wisdom as rather primitive.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#137

Post by InvisibleCities »

Why are we so surprised that animals understand the concept of zero? Being hungry, searching for food, and finding nothing seems like as universal and visceral experience of zero as anything I can imagine. I don’t think it’s possible to evaluate food sources without some idea of what zero means.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#138

Post by caddemon »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #135
caddemon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 analysi…

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?

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/

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

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.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#139

Post by ambicapter »

edgyquant wrote: post #113
Gravey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once watched several seagulls peck at a closed clamshell container containing pizza crusts for over half an hour. Clearly there is an upper bound to their intelligence.

I watched a crack head at the park look for something on the ground for an hour once. Clearly there is an upper bound for human intelligence as well /s

Do seagulls do crack?

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#140

Post by emodendroket »

aksss wrote: post #99
numpad0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never fully understood why some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion. Some hypothesizes and argues that our ancestors extinguished every other species that showed intelligence by eating them, which I think is a bit too wild of a theory. But maybe the fact that it’s often small birds that shows intelligence is also interesting. They’re among hardest to hunt.

That's a bit of hyperbole, isn't it? You never understood why some [most] cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different [than other animals]?? Well, smelting iron ore, and a long, long list of other unique accomplishments never replicated by any other species on the planet [or known universe for that matter] tends to crystalize the observation that there is something fundamentally different about this singul…

There is also no other animal with something like the human capacity for language, despite much effort being made to prove the opposite.
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