12/24/2022 0 Comments Vice versa symbolTo train them, the researchers put the bees through a Y-shaped maze. (In all cases, an upside-down “T” stood in for 3, and an “N” for 2.) Half learned to associate symbols with a numerical amount, and the other half the opposite, associating amounts with symbols. Then they monitored the bees for about two to four hours each. The researchers trained 20 honeybees and marked each insect with a colored dot to identify them. So, how do you train bees to recognize that a given symbol means a specific “numerosity,” or amount of something? Or that a specific numerosity corresponds to a given symbol? The same way you get humans to learn it at an early age: practice. Today’s find not only buffs up the bees’ reputation a little bit more, but also provides insights into how other species process and communicate the very concept of numbers. But clearly, backbones aren’t everything, and honeybees have what it takes to ‘get’ numbers like few other species so far can. They’re also pretty different evolutionarily from us and the other animals who’ve displayed an aptitude for math: pigeons, African grey parrots, rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees. This has all come as a bit of a shock, since the insects have under a billion neurons in their brains. ![]() That means honeybees can equate a symbol like the numeral 2 to the actual, abstract numerical quantity of 2 “things,” regardless of what the things are With a new study published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the same international team of researchers behind those discoveries has announced that bees are also capable of linking numerical symbols to actual quantities, and vice versa. ![]() Now the honeybee-math trilogy is complete. Then, in February, scientists said they’d discovered not only that bees can count, but that they can also do basic arithmetic. Almost exactly a year ago, we learned that bees can understand basic numbers, including the semi-abstract concept of zero. Well, guess who have turned out to be math people? Honeybees!ĭevoted readers may recall some past stories on this front. Some people like to say they’re not “math people” if they have trouble with the subject (though, that might not actually be a healthy approach ).
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