Study Suggests Baby Chicks Can Perform Basic Arithmetic
Italian researchers claim that baby chicks are capable of doing simple arithmetic.
The baby birds were able to distinguish between sets of two and three identical yellow balls.
One experiment showed that chicks consistently moved in the direction of a grouping of three balls instead of two.
"The results of the experiments showed that, in the absence of any specific training, chicks spontaneously discriminated between two and three, in both cases preferring the larger set," researchers from the universities of Padova and Trento noted in the report.
"We had already found that the chicks have a tendency to approach a group containing more of these familiar objects," said Professor Lucia Regolin, who studies animal behavior at the University of Padova.
"We used the little plastic containers you get inside Kinder eggs and suspended them from fishing line," Regolin told BBC News.
"We made these balls ‘disappear’ by moving them behind the screens one at a time."
Meanwhile, a chick would watch the process while being contained in a clear holding box. The researchers would move two balls behind one screen and three behind another.
“The chicks still approached the larger of the two groups first, even though they had to rely on memory to work out which screen to choose," said Regolin.
"In a further experiment, once we had hidden the balls behind each screen, we transferred some of them from one to the other," she said.
The birds took note and “they still chose correctly – adding up the numbers based on groups of objects they couldn’t see at that moment."
The study, reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, represent the first to show young animals’ ability to perform simple arithmetic without prior training.
Previous studies have shown that human infants may lose their ability to identify the size of groups beyond a total number of three.
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