ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Evolution of cognitive and neural solutions enabling numerosity judgements: lessons from primates and corvids.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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30 citing papers in PubMed, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- Towards a unified biology of vertebrate number sense.Communications biology · 2026Review
- Achieving cell-type specific transduction with adeno-associated viral vectors in pigeons.Current research in neurobiology · 2026Article
- Exploring the Neural Substrates of Number Sense: A Perspective on Genetics, Behaviour and Neural Circuity.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Review
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- At the roots of Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD): Semantic processing and numerosity perception.PloS one · 2026Article
- Shared cognitive biases influence numerical judgments in macaques and crows.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- PreyTouch: a touchscreen-based closed-loop system for studying predator-prey interactions.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Convergent Circuit Computation for Categorization in the Brains of Primates and Songbirds.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2023Review
- A connectome-based neuromarker of nonverbal number acuity and arithmetic skills.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Number selective sensorimotor neurons in the crow translate perceived numerosity into number of actions.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The evolution of quantitative sensitivity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Neurons in the Dorso-Central Division of Zebrafish Pallium Respond to Change in Visual Numerosity.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- "Prefrontal" Neuronal Foundations of Visual Asymmetries in Pigeons.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Article
- The Sense of Number in Fish, with Particular Reference to Its Neurobiological Bases.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- Young chicks rely on symmetry/asymmetry in perceptual grouping to discriminate sets of elements.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Behavioral and Neuronal Representation of Numerosity Zero in the Crow.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Non-human primate token use shows possibilities but also limitations for establishing a form of currency.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- AAV1 is the optimal viral vector for optogenetic experiments in pigeons (Columba livia).Communications biology · 2021Article
- Numerosities and Other Magnitudes in the Brains: A Comparative View.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Brains that are capable of representing numerosity, the number of items in a set, have arisen repeatedly and independently in different animal taxa. This review compares the cognitive and physiological mechanisms found in a nonhuman primate, the rhesus macaque, and a corvid songbird, the carrion crow, in order to elucidate the evolutionary adaptations underlying numerical competence. Monkeys and corvids are known for their advanced cognitive competence, despite them both having independently and distinctly evolved endbrains that resulted from a long history of parallel evolution. In both species, numerosity is represented as an analogue magnitude by an approximate number system that obeys the Weber-Fechner Law. In addition, the activity of numerosity-selective neurons in the fronto-parietal association cortex of monkeys and the telencephalic associative area nidopallium caudolaterale of crows mirrors the animals' performance. In both species' brains, neuronal activity is tuned to a preferred numerosity, encodes the numerical value in an approximate fashion, and is best represented on a logarithmic scale. Collectively, the data show an impressive correspondence of the cognitive and neuronal mechanisms for numerosity representations across monkeys and crows. This suggests that remotely related vertebrates with distinctly developed endbrains adopted similar physiological solutions to common computational problems in numerosity processing.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The origins of numerical abilities'.
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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.