Study suggests baby chicks can count from left to right just like us. It is not just humans who counts.
Newly published research suggests chicks seem to have a number sense, too.
Scientists found that chicks seem to count upward, moving from left to right. They put smaller numbers on the left, and larger numbers on the right — the same mental representation of the number line that humans use.
It turns out the inclination to associate low numbers with the left side of what scientists call the “mental number line,” and higher numbers on the right, may not be influenced by purely cultural factors like the direction you were taught to read.
The left-to-right way of thinking about ascending numbers seems to be embedded in people’s mental representations of numbers, but it’s not clear exactly why. Is it an artifact of some long-lost accident of history, or is it a fundamental aspect of the way the brain processes numbers?
After the chicks learned that the five-dot panel meant food, the researchers removed that panel and then placed the chicks in front of two panels, one to the left and the other to the right, that each had two dots. The chicks tended to go to the left panel, suggesting that they mentally represent numbers smaller than five as being to the left of five.
When the researchers put the chicks in front of two panels that each had eight dots, the chicks walked to the panel on the right. This suggests the chicks mentally represent numbers larger than five as being to the right of five, the researchers said.
In a second experiment, the researchers repeated the whole process, but started with a panel that had 20 dots instead of five. They then added two other panels that had either eight or 32 dots. Sure enough, the baby chicks tended to go to the left when the screens had just eight dots, and to the right when they had 32 dots
