ReviewFrontiers in psychology2020
Absolute Numerosity Discrimination as a Case Study in Comparative Vertebrate Intelligence.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Shared cognitive biases influence numerical judgments in macaques and crows.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Variability in cognitive strategies in a numerical discrimination task: individual and comparative insights from day-old domestic chicks (Gallus gallus).Journal of animal science · 2025Article
- The role of motor effort on the sensorimotor number system.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Information Theory Opens New Dimensions in Experimental Studies of Animal Behaviour and Communication.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Zebrafish excel in number discrimination under an operant conditioning paradigm.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Towards a standardization of non-symbolic numerical experiments: GeNEsIS, a flexible and user-friendly tool to generate controlled stimuli.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- Quantitative abilities of invertebrates: a methodological review.Animal cognition · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The question of whether some non-human animal species are more intelligent than others is a reoccurring theme in comparative psychology. To convincingly address this question, exact comparability of behavioral methodology and data across species is required. The current article explores one of the rare cases in which three vertebrate species (humans, macaques, and crows) experienced identical experimental conditions during the investigation of a core cognitive capability - the abstract categorization of absolute numerical quantity. We found that not every vertebrate species studied in numerical cognition were able to flexibly discriminate absolute numerosity, which suggests qualitative differences in numerical intelligence are present between vertebrates. Additionally, systematic differences in numerosity judgment accuracy exist among those species that could master abstract and flexible judgments of absolute numerosity, thus arguing for quantitative differences between vertebrates. These results demonstrate that Macphail's Null Hypotheses - which suggests that all non-human vertebrates are qualitatively and quantitatively of equal intelligence - is untenable.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.