• TrudeauCastroson [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    The reason this corvid study is different from intuitively knowing that 10-10=no berries is where this 0/empty set is represented on the numberline.

    Considering 0 as a number vs the empty set are two different concepts. It’s the difference between having a bank account with $0, vs having no bank account. They don’t close your account when you have $0, so it’s still an amount of money.

    Crows considering 0 on the numberline, and differently from the empty set shows they have a more abstract concept of numbers than we thought.

    Idk who authored this study, seems like a very specific kind of person who is both into number theory and neural pathways of birds to design.

    • Raine_Wolf@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Or Anthropology. Right now, we have realized that New Caledonian crows have entered an equivalent to the early stone age in humans. Therefore, we can gain a lot of insight both about the nature of technological progression and of the very nature of intelligence (and the differences between mammalian and avian intelligence) by doing these studies.