The most complex test required the chicks to keep track of the number of balls through addition or subtraction, since balls were transferred either individually or in sets from one screen to another. Despite the ball disappearing acts, the chicks spontaneously chose the screen hiding the larger number of hidden toys. The birds made their selection by sticking their heads behind the correct screen to see their old "companions." As for the chicks' ability to work with a larger set than human babies could, the researchers speculate it might have something to do with family size. They suspect chicks might even be able to work with up to 10 balls, because broods often consist of eight to 10 siblings, but Rugani said she and her team haven't yet "investigated the upper limit of chicks' ability in this task." Since non-human animals appear to have natural math skills, it's now thought that children, whose math abilities far exceed those of chickens as the two species mature, don't need to master the logic of arithmetic tables to add and subtract. A preliminary study conducted by Harvard researcher Elizabeth Spelke and colleagues showed that five-year-old children could even handle simple word problems like, "Sarah has 64 candies and gives 13 of them away, and John has 34 candies. Who has more?" "We've known for some time that adults, children and even infants and nonhuman animals have a sense of number," Spelke said. "We were surprised to see, however, that children spontaneously use their number sense when they're presented with problems in symbolic arithmetic." Related Links: Parrot Counts Using Four Different Languages Researchers Counting on Animals for Clues to Math HowStuffWorks.com: Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? |
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