When quantity trumps number: discrimination experiments in cotton-top tamarins (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Saguinus oedipus</Emphasis>) and common marmosets (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Callithrix jacchus</Emphasis>) |
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Authors: | Jeffrey R Stevens Justin N Wood Marc D Hauser |
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Institution: | (1) Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA;(2) Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA;(3) Department of Biological Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA;(4) Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzealle 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany |
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Abstract: | The capacity for non-linguistic, numerical discrimination has been well characterized in non-human animals, with recent studies
providing careful controls for non-numerical confounds such as continuous extent, density, and quantity. More poorly understood
are the conditions under which animals use numerical versus non-numerical quantification, and the nature of the relation between
these two systems. Here we test whether cotton-top tamarins and common marmosets can discriminate between two quantities on
the basis of the amount of food rather than on number. In three experiments, we show that when choosing between arrays containing
different numbers and sizes of food objects, both species based their decisions on the amount of food with only minor influences
of numerical information. Further, we find that subjects successfully discriminated between two quantities differing by a
2:3 or greater ratio, which is consistent with the ratio limits found for numerical discrimination with this species. These
studies demonstrate that non-human primates possess mechanisms that enable quantification of total amount, in addition to
the numerical representations demonstrated in previous studies, with both types of quantification subject to similar processing
limits. |
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Keywords: | Analog magnitude Callitrichids Foraging Non-linguistic quantification Numerical discrimination |
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