Arithmetic calculation is not unique to Man. Some birds, insects, monkeys and fish have a sense of numbers. But they are not the only ones. A study, published in the journal Science Advances, claims that rats know how to understand numbers as such.
The South Korean research team behind this study made the discovery after conducting an experiment with rats that had not previously learned to count. She trained the rodents to recognize sound stimuli representing two or three numbers. She also designed an algorithm to help these small mammals focus only on numerical values, and not on other distracting factors. “This (helped) us better understand how animals perceive and quantify numbers“, explains Professor Wing-Ho Yung, co-signatory of the study, in a press release.
Wing-Ho Yung and his colleagues found that rats are able to develop a sense of numbers based on sound signals. And this, even without them having any prior knowledge of arithmetic. This suggests that number is a basic property that rodent brains automatically extract from their environment.
The researchers also noticed that the rats' ability to understand numbers was affected when they blocked their posterior parietal cortex, the area of the brain that plays a crucial role in processing spatial and sensory information. But surprisingly, their sense of grandeur was not compromised in this scenario, suggesting that the rats' brains have a specific area for processing numbers.
Overall, this study prompts us to reconsider the cognitive abilities of animals, which appear much more complex and nuanced than previously considered. Research on the subject shows that the brains of animals are wired to perceive these very abstract things like numbers. This is why some species are able to do sophisticated calculations like addition and subtraction. But the scientific community agrees that it would be presumptuous to say, however, that animals are born mathematicians.
