Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1740/20160507?etoc
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Half a century ago, the assumption that the ability to perceive and reason about number was uniquely human was taken more or less for granted in all of the cognitive sciences, Koehler's above-mentioned evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Experimental work in the last several decades has essentially reversed that assumption. There is now a broad consensus that the perception of numerosity and elementary numerical computation (the application of the ordering operation, ≥, for example) to number percepts are found even in arthropods. The arthropods diverged from the chordata (hence from the later evolving vertebrata and mammalia) in the early Cambrian.
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The fact that newborn chicks, fish and human neonates can make numerical discriminations suggests that this capacity does not arise as a result of interaction with the environment, but is inherited though subsequent interaction with environment doubtless modifies and refines the operation of this mechanism.
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Do math or die!
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Half a century ago, the assumption that the ability to perceive and reason about number was uniquely human was taken more or less for granted in all of the cognitive sciences, Koehler's above-mentioned evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Experimental work in the last several decades has essentially reversed that assumption. There is now a broad consensus that the perception of numerosity and elementary numerical computation (the application of the ordering operation, ≥, for example) to number percepts are found even in arthropods. The arthropods diverged from the chordata (hence from the later evolving vertebrata and mammalia) in the early Cambrian.
...
The fact that newborn chicks, fish and human neonates can make numerical discriminations suggests that this capacity does not arise as a result of interaction with the environment, but is inherited though subsequent interaction with environment doubtless modifies and refines the operation of this mechanism.
..
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Do math or die!
