On 7 April 2014 17:20, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/6/2014 9:14 PM, LizR wrote: > > Interesting. That seems like quite a complicated thing in itself. I don't > know if crows would have the abstract idea of counting, or if they had to > do it some other way ("we've had the guy with the hat, the short one, the > one with glasses, the other one with glasses ... hm, maybe there's some way > I could lump those together somehow... did we have the one with the tweed > jacket yet?") > > As I recall they tried changing jackets and hats, etc, in order to make > sure it was counting. Of course the crows probably weren't subvocalizing > "one", "two", "three",... like a human would. >
Really? Good, that would certainly help to eliminate the idea that the crows recognised each human individually. PS Obviously I don't assume they use words for the numbers! (Or anything of that sort.) But I believe there is an idea that animals (and people) have a built-in ability to "count automatically" to some small number in a languge- (and knowledge-of-maths-) independent way. This wouldn't necessarily indicate general purpose intelligence though. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
