ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Association neurons in the crow telencephalon link visual signs to numerical values.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Categorical Representation of Numerosity in the Pigeon Entopallium: Coding Format and Temporal Dynamics.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- The songbird connectome (OSCINE-NET.ORG): structure-function organization beyond the canonical vocal control network.BMC neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
- A perspective on neuroethology: what the past teaches us about the future of neuroethology.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2024Review
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Many animals can associate signs with numerical values and use these signs in a goal-directed way during task performance. However, the neuronal basis of this semantic association has only rarely been investigated, and so far only in primates. How mechanisms of number associations are implemented in the distinctly evolved brains of other animal taxa such as birds is currently unknown. Here, we explored this semantic number-sign mapping by recording single-neuron activity in the crows' nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), a brain structure critically involved in avian numerical cognition. Crows were trained to associate visual shapes with varying numbers of items in a number production task. The responses of many NCL neurons during stimulus presentation reflected the numerical values associated with visual shapes in a behaviorally relevant way. Consistent with the crow's better behavioral performance with signs, neuronal representations of numerical values extracted from shapes were more selective compared to those from dot arrays. The existence of number association neurons in crows points to a phylogenetic preadaptation of the brains of cognitively advanced vertebrates to link visual shapes with numerical meaning.
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