Rudimentary math skills among fish
Marilyn sez, "In an experiment at the U. of Padua last year, female mosquito fish preferred to join shoals that were larger by just one fish, 'preferring shoals of four fish rather than three fish, and consistently preferring shoals of three fish over those containing just two.'"
This means that they have similar counting abilities to those observed in apes, monkeys and dolphins and humans with very limited mathematical ability.Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)Christian Agrillo, an experimental psychologist at the university of Padua in Italy said: "We have provided the first evidence that fish exhibit rudimentary mathematical abilities."
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So the quest for intelligence in animals has found another victim, and once more people think that mathematics must be an act of intelligence. Most likely, it is not.
I'd bet my two cents here that this fish prefers the company of 4 rather than 3 fishes not because he counted them and found out that 4>3, but that meeting other fishes of the same species triggers some kind of neuroactivity that is associated with the fishes well-being and the choice between two groups of fishes comes down to "I feel better here" rather than "1, 2, 3, 4 ... there are more buddies here".
(It is plausible that human intelligence comes down to the same principle, although vastly more complex.)
I should read the whole article (but then I'll get bored, give up, and re-read my Archie comics), but from what I've read hear...why can they count again?
If I see a group of two people next to a group of three people, I don't need to count them to figure out which is the larger group. Size is obvious, grouping is obvious... That fish can do what babies do doesn't make me like sushi any less.
Counting? No, not unless I actually read the piece. But what are the odds? In the words of HST, "Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll."
one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish...
I did read the article, and I'd have liked to see an experiment where a fish chose between a group of four small fish and a group of three rather large fish. I have a feeling this has a lot more to do with perceived mass of the group than the actual count.
Fish don't spend all that time in schools for nothing.
I think simply attributing this to "ability to perform math" is quite suspect. Psychology is guilty of misattributing true cause at times because it is really a very soft science unlike a science like physics or its even more difficult counterpart, engineering. Could it be that 4 fish simply take up "more" of the field of vision than 3 fish? Then the fish simply goes toward the larger "similar" fish space.
More research needed please.
Agreed with all others suspicious of the "math" aspect of this. If anything, they recognize a larger group of fish rather than the fish sitting there and counting individuals to determine group size.
Frogs can count too. As eloquently explained by Terry Pratchett in Wings:
"They stared at the branch. There wasn't just one flower out there, there were dozens, although the frogs weren't able to think like this because frogs can't count beyond one. They saw lots of ones."
I don't know why it's so hard to accept that most animals (vertebrates) are sentient (obviously to varying degrees).
Mass? Count? So what? It's judgement based upon symbolic criteria.
Neon tetras (tiny aquarium fish) can tell one human face apart from others after only a few days (of feeding them :-). OK, parsing neon tetra "faces" makes sense... but human faces?
Dogs understand human spoken language (limited structure and vocabulary). It's not "sound memorizing" it's speaker independent and partial words in context are recognized. Dogs parsing dog barking (which contains emotional stuff, not strictly symbolic) OK, but human? It does not matter dogs exposed to human culture 20K years; if the facility wasn't there it would not have developed.
Animals are sentient, get over it. Some are dumb as a bag of hammers as regards human-valued skills, but so what?
I for one welcome our new water breathing overlords.
"Some are dumb as a bag of hammers"
I believe this also applies to a number of humans as well.
Although I guess it depends on what one means by 'rudimentary math' but I suspect this is probably more to do with basic subitization mechanisms than any higher level processes.
@MALCOLMCASS "Psychology ... is really a very soft science". That statement's waaaaay too general bro! Psychology covers many subdisciplines, some more 'scientific' than others. Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, for example, use the same rigorous methods as used by the natural sciences.
@9 Sentient yes, sapient no.
I don't know about the counting, but schooling behavior is neato. Newly hatched fry don't know how to school, they have a lot of near misses before they get the hang of it. If a baby fish of a schooling species hatches out and is not raised with others of its kind, it does not know how to school. It will learn, when reunited with the others, but it never swims in formation quite so tidily.
It's called polarization. Birds do it too. Nice trick, eh?
It's a natural herding instinct. The larger the flock, herd, bevy, school, murder or pride the safer the individual.
No real computation involved.
Safety in numbers!
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@Foobar: dogs that recognize words spoken by different humans, and neon tetras that can distinguish between human faces are more than sentient, even if you don't want to go so far as declaring they're sapient. In National Geo this month there's a story called "Animal Minds" that argues that every time an animal researcher discovers some behavior that appears to be an example of thinking (tool-making among crows, for example), the human cognitive psychologists move the goalposts: "It's a common complaint among animal researchers. Whenever they find a mental skill in a species that is reminiscent of a special human ability, the human cognition scientists change the definition." But what do you make of a dog (border collie, of course) named Betsy (not her real name) who can look at a color photo of a toy she's never seen in real life, study it for a minute, and then go into another room and choose that toy from among others and bring it back?
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/animal-minds/virginia-morell-text
So I study (drum roll?)-- fish behavior. Seriously. Numerical discrimination in animals is super cool -- examples of it help us understand mechanisms that might underlie the evolution of our own intelligence. As MalcolmKass posits, we have other examples of fish (namely swordtails) that can numerically discriminate based on the proportion of their visual field that is stimulated. In the case of the swordtails, they can distinguish the number of black bars on the side of a rival and make decisions about the rival's likely level of aggression (more bars = much more aggressive). And mosquito fish are actually VERY closely related to swordtails. Amphibians do it too -- one of my undergrads this past summer conducted an experiment that demonstrated that female salamanders (but not males) prefer to hunt in vials that contain 6 food items to vials with 5 food items -- probably because as the daphnia bounce around, the visual field receives more stimulation from 6 than 5. Which just goes to show that we often discount the abilities of animals to make complex decisions -- mosquito fish, sword tails and salamanders can all make decisions using relative information.
BUT -- Calling numerical discrimination at this level "math" isn't accurate and science requires precision language. It's a fascinating window into possible origins for complex numerical operations and symbolic logic, and suggests a much longer evolutionary history for these abilities than anyone imagined ... but it's still not "math."
it help us understand mechanisms that might underlie the evolution of our own intelligence.
It's weird to me how so many people require a clearly delineated line between humans and everything else in existence. More of a moat really, with a barbed wire fence and surly guards with machine guns. And yet, in an ironic twist, the same people will loudly defend evolution against creationism. If you believe in evolution, how can you not view intelligence as a continuum? The notion that human intelligence is qualitatively different than the intelligence of other animals is just another flavor of the soupy thinking that underlies creationist philosophy.
@manicbassman - That is exactly what I was thinking.
Tomic, I think that there is some confusion in your interpretation of the posts here. I don't think that most people here have any problem accepting the idea of animal sentience, as it would be profoundly unscientific to reject it. However, the conclusions made from this particular experiment are questionable, and relating it to sentience or intelligence seems absurd. If we were to take this experiment, by itself, to indicate that the fish are sentient or intelligent by some definition, then what would keep the ~10nm structures that I can easily create in the lab, which have the same behaviour, from being considered sentient?
However, for those discussing intelligence and sentience in regards to this ability, it should be noted that the article doesn't mention either. Nevertheless, I'm still skeptical of the idea that this by itself demonstrates rudimentary mathematical skills by most definitions, since that too would result in some rather odd consequences.
@Antinous, It's weird to me how so many people require a clearly delineated line between humans and everything else in existence.
If you are human, then human intelligence is the only type you've got. That's the moat, and the wire. We can't ask the fish what it thinks. We can only observe and ponder, and pick bugs from each other's hairy backs. You aren't a fish and don't think like one, no matter how much sushi you eat.
Intelligence is not a single faculty. It's a cluster of different faculties, many of which we share with other animals. We have some unique faculties as do other species. Even among humans, faculties vary greatly. Viewing humans as qualitatively 'special' turns our type of intelligence into something mystic. It's a profoundly unscientific view of consciousness.
@antinous
"Viewing humans as qualitatively 'special' turns our type of intelligence into something mystic".
I don't think that necessarily follows at all. Our intelligence may be qualitatively special (because of our relatively large frontal cortex, use of language etc.) without it being seen as 'mystic' in any way. It's all still based on computational processes being carried out by nervous systems. It's just that human brains may have evolved qualitatively special ones -- and that's why we're able to discuss these things on the internet while dolphins and chimpanzees aren't.
that's why we're able to discuss these things on the internet while dolphins and chimpanzees aren't.
But what faculties do they possess that we haven't even comprehended?
@WA -- you're right, the article doesn't go into intelligence. My broader point was that I thought the study was cool, but a bit scientifically dicey in its conclusions. The evolution of intelligence and numerical abilities was one interesting tangent that struck me.
@antinous -- actually, I don't think there's a line between humans and animals -- if there's a moat, then we couldn't use animal models to understand how cognitive abilities in humans might evolve -- you'd have to stick exclusively with humans. (In the same way we couldn't use lab rats to test cancer treatments if we didn't expect those treatments to work in a similar way in rats as humans because we are both mammals with a long shared evolutionary history). Comparative studies look for shared and dissimilar traits in both close and distantly related organisms to understand the particular history of whatever organism is being studied. As humans, we have a (maybe narcissistic) drive to understand the biological underpinnings of our own consciousness. One tool we can apply is tracking when and where various complex behaviors emerge in the tree of life -- because we're part of it.
Fishchix,
That was my point. There is no dividing line except for the one that we've created. Part of the problem is the artificial separation of perception and cognition. It's kind of like arts versus crafts. Art is significant and meaningful. Craft is something that women do. Occasionally something gets upgraded. It's just a prejudice. Faculties in which humans excel become intelligence or cognition. Those in which other species excel become instinct or crude sense perception. We manipulate the definitions to maintain our aura of specialness. Many of the arguments in favor of our superiority boil down to our very efficient vocal apparatus and manual dexterity, which are really just a structural aptitude for expressing complex language. If there were a species smarter than us, we would just adjust the definitions to render them inferior.
@antinous
"If there were a species smarter than us, we would just adjust the definitions to render them inferior."
If that were the case, they'd be doing the adjusting, surely?
Seriously though, the difference between human and other animal cognition is not just a matter of definition; it can be (and is) studied experimentally. Although several species show remarkable cognitive abilities, they don't have capacity for anything like the complex problem solving and reasoning that humans do. Their cognition has evolved to enable them to adapt to their environments, which is fine. But to say that "We manipulate the definitions to maintain our aura of specialness" and that "Many of the arguments in favor of our superiority boil down to our very efficient vocal apparatus and manual dexterity, which are really just a structural aptitude for expressing complex language" is to ignore the basic facts about the significant differences that exist between the cognition of humans and other animals.
the basic facts about the significant differences that exist between the cognition of humans and other animals
Different yes. Superior no. Scientists almost always ask questions designed to prove their hypotheses. Science has often "proven" that men are smarter than women, that white people are smarter than non-white people. I'll assume that you don't cotton to that use of science. Even the fish example here attempts to squeeze whatever faculty the fish are employing into a human cognitive paradigm. As to human problem solving abilities - which other species has brought life on earth to the edge of extinction? It's the doctrine of human specialness that had led us to this point. Most other animals know better than to shit where they eat.
travelina, betsy is merely picking the new toy because the control toys all remain the same and she has seen them plenty of times already.
Hippocritical, the National Geographic article clearly states that Betsy has not seen any of the toys before.
Fishchix, I would love to hear more about your research sometime; that sounds fascinating.
As for this article, I agree with the commenters so far that the vocabulary as expressed is vague at best, but surely it hasn't escaped everyone that this is a popular press article, right? Trying to find the "research published on BBC's loveearth" (blech), but I can't find the damn search function on the flashhappy website.
Okay, I googled the head scientist's name from the article and found the SpringerLink. I really should be doing my own damn homework, but from a quick skim of the article, the reason the scientists who did the research are asserting that the mosquitofish can numerically discriminate/count (up to four) as opposed to just visually discerning which group is the larger is because they can tell the difference between shoals of 2/3 and 3/4, but NOT 4/5 and 5/6. Presumably, the argument goes, if they were working by stimulus of visual field, they would be able to pick in the latter two cases as well. It's like Watership Down and hrair. (I'm not trying to say mosquitofish have a counting system and a culture, just drawing a loose analogy.)
There are other experiments with larger shoals as well. Take a read - it's a short paper, and quite interesting!