In kindergarten, I bet your teacher used some combination of blocks, M&M, and maybe blueberry-scented stickers to break the importance of arithmetic in your nascent brain. The goal was to create a future in which you can add, subtract and multiply at will – ready for adulthood, full of Excel spreadsheets and taxes, of course.
Well, scientists have just taken several underwater creatures – cichlids and stingrays – through a very similar experience, and to their surprise, the fish went through with amazing colors.
In an article published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, the research team says these animals have shown the ability to learn basic math and even use that knowledge to solve small logic puzzles given to them.
“We trained animals to perform simple additions and subtractions,” said Vera Schlussel of the Institute of Zoology at the University of Bonn and lead author of the study. “In doing so, they had to increase or decrease the initial value by one.”
What could stingrays and cichlids do with these numerical skills? On the one hand, the bony cichlids of the team are living favorites in the aquarium, mostly worried about their marine nests to the extent that they can become a little aggressive and territorial. On the other hand, cartilaginous stingrays rest peacefully at the bottom of the ocean, leading a rather solitary lifestyle and threatening prey from afar.
Although researchers are not entirely sure of the answer, they point out that these findings still add to the accumulated body of evidence that fish are much smarter than we think and deserve much more respect than we suggest.
Very fishy arithmetic puzzle
Here’s what the team’s clever fish went through in their initial underwater math lesson. The first step was training.
Scientists first place each animal in a tank and give it an image with between one and five squares, circles and triangles. Although these shapes were different sizes and sometimes mixed, they were always either blue or yellow. Blue meant “add one.” Yellow meant “take out one.”
“The animals had to recognize the number of objects depicted and at the same time deduce the calculation rule from their color,” Schlussel said. In other words, three blue squares translated to “3 + 1”.
Then, after each animal memorized its image, it was given two new images. Image one will have one shape less and two will have one shape more. Depending on the color and number of shapes of the original image of the object, the animal had to swim to the corresponding second image.
Here is an example.
Let’s say that four yellow figures were shown on the slope for the first time. Is that the equivalent of asking them what 4-1 is? When this stingray gets the two new images, he has to swim to the one that has three shapes. When you really think about it, it’s not a super simple task. “They had to keep both in working memory when the original photo was exchanged for both results. Then they had to decide on the right result,” Schlussel said. “Overall, it’s a feat that requires sophisticated thinking skills.”
Every time the animals got the right answer, they got a little treat. Over time, according to the study, six cichlids and four stingrays came to the forefront of their class. They learned the rules – and quite well, although it was a little harder to get out for both species. But this is understandable, I’m sure most people would feel the same.
Testing time
After the end of the training period, it was time for a test.
The researchers wanted to make sure that these animals are not just being trained to receive a tasty reward with certain images, but rather have really mastered how to add and subtract. “We deliberately missed some calculations during training,” Schlussel explained. “Namely 3 + 1 and 3-1. After the training phase, the animals had to see these two tasks for the first time. But even in these tests, they often chose the right answer.”
And later, after further complicating the tests by proposing a second image where two forms were added instead of just one, for example, the researchers found that animals still chose the right answer – for the most part, ie.
Although the results of the team’s new research are not incredibly shocking, as fish have already been shown to distinguish between numerical values in the past, researchers still find it surprising that these animals can use sophisticated strategies such as arithmetic to manipulate the quantities in your mind.
This is because they do not have a cerebral cortex or part of the brain built to perform complex cognitive tasks, as we and other vertebrates do. Thus, it is quite incredible that the two species studied exhibit a similar thought process as us without the instrument. Interestingly, the team’s procedure is based on a mechanism previously used in bees, which ultimately found that buzzers also successfully calculated quantities despite the lack of the cerebral cortex.
“Given that honey bees and humans are separated by more than 400 million years of evolution,” write the authors of the study of bees in their 2019 article published in Science Advances, “our findings show that improved numerical knowledge can be more accessible to non-human animals than before. suspect. “
If nothing else, all this is just another confirmation that animals should not be like humans at least to consider them intelligent and dignified.