THE NUMBER CONCEPTION IN ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY

Autor: H. Honigmann
Rok vydání: 1942
Předmět:
Zdroj: Biological Reviews. 17:315-337
ISSN: 1469-185X
1464-7931
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-185x.1942.tb00442.x
Popis: Summary 1. The first attempts to approach the problem of number conception in animals consisted in a training to identify one object out of many by its relative position. 2. The multiple-choice method, although an advance on previous work, has yielded relatively poor results. The only apparent exception, namely the striking results obtained with finches, is probably due to a technical error. 3. Experiments with a temporal maze have shown that it is extremely difficult for animals to perform a double alternation, and no animal has yet been trained to perform this more than once successively. Claims that some birds are able to select every third out of a line of similar objects are without convincing foundation owing to the lack of adequate control tests. 4. The experiments of Verlaine and his collaborators led to the belief in a genuine number conception in animals, but the lack of satisfactory controls deprives the results of these cleverly devised experiments of validity. 5. Bierens de Haan repeated these experiments on a sound basis with the necessary controls. He found that the animals trained themselves to perform two or three single actions in a certain rhythm, and that consequently increasing the intervals between the single actions destroyed the training. 6. Systematic investigation of the two basic abilities of performing an action a certain number of times and of discriminating between two quantities of objects gave the interesting result that the limit in both cases is respectively 6 or 5:6 for all animals investigated. The discrimination between 6 and 7 has never been achieved. 7. Experiments with parrakeets gave better results than with pigeons, but both groups were surpassed by the achievements of jackdaws. The latter were able to learn four different kinds of number training, and to make use of them simultaneously. They could also to a certain extent combine both basic abilities. But a close analysis of these surprising accomplishments shows that even here any counting or number conception in the human sense of the word does not exist.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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