ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
The evolution of quantitative sensitivity.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 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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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Segmentation as a bottleneck in numerical cognition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Evolution of cellular architecture and function of the hippocampus: insights from the artificial selection experiment.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Short-term memory, attentional control and brain size in primates.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Habitat complexity influences neuron number in six species of Puerto RicanBiology letters · 2024Article
- Slowly walking down to the more food: relative quantity discrimination in African spurred tortoises (Centrochelys sulcata).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Sex differences in white matter tracts of capuchin monkey brains.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2023Article
- Entropy and Cross-Level Orderliness in Light of the Interconnection between the Neural System and Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Neuroscience needs evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Breaking bonds: maternal and offspring states relate to constraint-based brood donation in a seaduck.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
17 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The ability to represent approximate quantities appears to be phylogenetically widespread, but the selective pressures and proximate mechanisms favouring this ability remain unknown. We analysed quantity discrimination data from 672 subjects across 33 bird and mammal species, using a novel Bayesian model that combined phylogenetic regression with a model of number psychophysics and random effect components. This allowed us to combine data from 49 studies and calculate the Weber fraction (a measure of quantity representation precision) for each species. We then examined which cognitive, socioecological and biological factors were related to variance in Weber fraction. We found contributions of phylogeny to quantity discrimination performance across taxa. Of the neural, socioecological and general cognitive factors we tested, cortical neuron density and domain-general cognition were the strongest predictors of Weber fraction, controlling for phylogeny. Our study is a new demonstration of evolutionary constraints on cognition, as well as of a relation between species-specific neuron density and a particular cognitive ability. This article is part of the theme issue 'Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory'.
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Registered trials
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