ArticleFrontiers in psychology2013
Numerical cognition in bees and other insects.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exploring emotional expression in invertebrates: mechanisms, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Buzzed but not elated? Effect of ethanol on cognitive judgement bias in honeybees.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- The Social Relevance of Numbers: Insights from Animal Studies.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Honey bees rely on associative stimulus strength after training on an olfactory transitive inference task.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Grouping rule in tadpole: is quantity more or size assortment more important?Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Numerical discrimination in Drosophila melanogaster.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Information Theory Opens New Dimensions in Experimental Studies of Animal Behaviour and Communication.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- The decision-making process of leafcutting bees when selecting patches.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Is two cuter than one? number and relationship effects on the feeling of kawaii toward social robots.PloS one · 2023Article
- Prior associations affect bumblebees' generalization performance in a tool-selection task.iScience · 2022Article
- The cultural origins of symbolic number.Psychological review · 2022Article
- Does quantity matter to a stingless bee?Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Cichlids and stingrays can add and subtract 'one' in the number space from one to five.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Exact Number Concepts Are Limited to the Verbal Count Range.Psychological science · 2022Article
- Quantitative abilities of invertebrates: a methodological review.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Insects Provide Unique Systems to Investigate How Early-Life Experience Alters the Brain and Behavior.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Review
- Feeding specialization and longer generation time are associated with relatively larger brains in bees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Article
- The lemur baseline: how lemurs compare to monkeys and apes in the Primate Cognition Test Battery.PeerJ · 2020Article
- Searching for the CriticalFrontiers in psychology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to perceive the number of objects has been known to exist in vertebrates for a few decades, but recent behavioral investigations have demonstrated that several invertebrate species can also be placed on the continuum of numerical abilities shared with birds, mammals, and reptiles. In this review article, we present the main experimental studies that have examined the ability of insects to use numerical information. These studies have made use of a wide range of methodologies, and for this reason it is striking that a common finding is the inability of the tested animals to discriminate numerical quantities greater than four. Furthermore, the finding that bees can not only transfer learnt numerical discrimination to novel objects, but also to novel numerosities, is strongly suggestive of a true, albeit limited, ability to count. Later in the review, we evaluate the available evidence to narrow down the possible mechanisms that the animals might be using to solve the number-based experimental tasks presented to them. We conclude by suggesting avenues of further research that take into account variables such as the animals' age and experience, as well as complementary cognitive systems such as attention and the time sense.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.