Pigeons (Columba livia) learn to link numerosities with symbols.

Abstract

After responding to each element in varying, successive numerosity displays, pigeons (Columba livia) had to choose, out of an array of symbols, the symbol designated to correspond to the preceding number of elements. After extensive training, 5 pigeons responded with significant accuracy to the numerosities 1 to 4, and 2 pigeons to the numerosities 1 to 5. Several tests showed that feedback tones accompanying element pecks, the familiarity of element configurations, and the shape of the elements were not crucial to this performance. One test, however, indicated that the number of pecks issued to the elements was important for numerosities above 2. An additional test confirmed that the birds chose the symbol that corresponded to a particular numerosity rather than the positions that the symbols had held during training.

Iconic and non-iconic stages in number development: the role of language

“…The evidence available so far suggests that apes, dolphins, and birds can learn to use arbitrary signs for cardinalities [52][53][54][55], and apes have also been taught to arrange such symbols sequentially [55][56][57][58]. Can these animals also learn to systematically draw on relations within the number sequence, that is, to use the sequence as a tool that can be employed to indicate different kinds of empirical relations (cardinal, ordinal, and even nominal)?…”

Numerosity representations in crows obey the Weber–Fechner law

“…In their natural habitat, birds use numerical information to counteract nest parasitism [17], to forage for food [18][19][20] or to communicate with conspecifics [21]. Birds can also be trained in the laboratory to distinguish stimuli based on the number of items [8,22,23]. Corvid songbirds are renowned for their flexible behaviour [24], making them ideal model organisms for the study of cognition [25,26] and high-level brain functions [27][28][29][30].…”

Acquisition and Limited Transfer of Numerical Discrimination of Object Stimuli in Rats

“…Rhesus monkeys (Brannon & Terrance, 1998 can judge the ordinal relationship of a number of different figures on a computer monitor. Pigeons can learn a symbolic matching-to-sample task in which they have to respond to symbols representing numbers (Xia, Emmerton, Siemann, & Delius, 2001;Xia, Siemann, & Delius, 2000), while an African Grey parrot could give a vocal answer to the number of objects or the sum of two cardinal numbers (Pepperberg, 1994(Pepperberg, , 2012.…”