98 years old and STILL counting his chickens

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Based on a brilliantly-designed experiment with three-day old chicks, it appears to leave no doubt that chickens do indeed count from left to right, as had been suspected from previous studies but never quite so convincingly demonstrated before.

The lead author of the paper, Rosa Rugani, had previously reported a study on chicks in which they were trained to peck at one of a series of boxes arranged one in front of another on a table.

Having learnt that box number four was the one containing food, they were then presented with a series of boxes arranged from left to right and they were found to peck at the fourth box from the left significantly more often than the other boxes.

That experiment suggested that the chicks counted from the left, but it might also have been influenced by a non-numerical preference for left over right.

Humans show such a preference. We spend more time looking at the left side of pictures or faces and we see things faster when they are presented on the left than on the right.

In the new paper, entitled Number Space Mapping In The Newborn Chick Resembles Humans’ Number Line, Rugani explains an ingenious study showing that chicks specifically think of lower numbers on the left and higher numbers on the right, whatever their inbuilt preferences may be.

First, the chicks were trained to walk round a panel in order to obtain food. The panel clearly displayed on its front five identical spots.

It appears to leave no doubt that chickens do indeed count from left to right

Once a chick had learnt to walk round it, the experiment moved on to phase two, in which instead of one centrally placed panel, the chick was now faced with two, one on the right and one on the left.

This time, although the two panels displayed the same number of spots, it was different from the number that had been used in the original training.

Remarkably, the results showed that if the number of spots was smaller than the number used in the training, the chicks went to the left-hand panel while if it was larger, they went to the right hand panel.

The experiments even confirmed that it was not the raw size of the number that caused chicks to prefer left or right but its relative size to the number used in training.

When they were trained with a panel displaying 20 dots and then given the choice of two panels showing eight dots, they chose the one of the left, as it is a lower number than 20; but when they were trained on the number five, then presented with panels with eight dots, they chose the one on the right, as eight is higher than five.

When humans think of numbers, we represent them on a Mental Number Line (MNL) with smaller numbers on the left, which it has been suggested is caused by cultural conditioning possibly associated with our reading from left to right.

The chicken result, however, suggests that the origin of the MNL may lie a very long way back indeed in our evolution. 

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