I read and hear a lot of things along the lines of “Species X cannot count above 10” and I’ve never understood what exactly that meant. Is it like how people have a hard time wrapping their head around the concept of infinity?
In: Biology
It would say it is more like a regular person trying to figure out how to beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. It is so beyond your capabilities, you can’t even begin to go about it, even with years of training.
Similarly, animals just don’t have the mental hardware to do anything but the simplest math, usually limited to understanding very small numbers.
You can train a dog to get you exactly one ball, or two balls, or three balls.
You can’t train a dog to get you exactly 59 balls.
That suggests they have the ability to remember (or re-count) that they’ve already retrieved one or two, but lose track of the count quickly.
Put 1 of something on a table, you definitely can tell there is one of it.
Put 2 of something on a table, you definitely can tell there is two of them.
Put 3 of something on a table, you definitely can tell there is three of them.
Put 27 of something on a table and you can’t just SEE that, you have to count them. your brain can just look at two of something and just automatically have a built in “there is two” but past a certain point you have to use a system to keep track and figure it out. Animals have the same ‘there is two of them” ability, but can not count beyond that. You understand that 154 is a diffrent number than 168, but you can’t just look at a pile of things and just know it, you have to count. If it’s 3 of something vs 2 of something you don’t have to count.
It’s about how many of a thing you can look at and go “there are X of this thing” before you start just going “there is *around* X of this thing” or “There is a lot of this thing”. If you can count to 5, you can recognise 5 objects, but if you are presented with 6 objects, your brain goes “more than 5”, exactly the same as it would if presented with 600 objects.
Many animals can count up to a certain number easily and after that it generally becomes like more than 10, the specific number no longer matters when it gets that high as it has no evolutionary advantage to be able to count higher, whether that is number of fruit on the tree, number of babies, or even number of carnivores chasing you after 10 or however many it no longer matters and just becomes lots.
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