1. 1. Head: Terentyeva T. M., primary school teacher of MKOU Secondary School No. 1 town. Kavalerovo, Primorsky Territory Completed by students of grade 3 “B” of MKOU secondary school No. 1 town. Kavalerovo, Primorsky Krai
2. Hypothesis: We love to watch a cartoon where a little goat can count to ten. Do animals really know how to do simple arithmetic? Do we think animals can count?
3. 3. Crows The crow is able to count to seven, and even to nine. The crow understands that seven cherries are more than six. But piles of ten and eleven cherries are the same for her.06/03/12 http://aida.ucoz.ru 3
4. 4. Pisces Pisces can count to 4. They can visually distinguish larger numbers. So, for example, a female will see the difference between groups of 16 and 8 fish, but will not be able to distinguish between schools of 12 and 8 fish.
5. 5. Chimpanzee A chimpanzee trained to count takes out of the box and gives the experimenter as many sticks as he asks for. There are 4 sticks left in the box. The experimenter asked for five. What do you think the chimpanzee will do? After thinking for a while, the monkey breaks one stick in half and hands the person five sticks.
6. 6. Canary The canary can choose a certain number of objects, regardless of their color, size or shape.
7. 7. Salamander Salamander is able to understand that two is less than three, but cannot count further
8. 8. Rat A rat can learn to press a lever up to 40-45 times to get food.
9. 9. JackdawGalka is able to understand that two groups have the same number of different objects.
10. 10. Conclusion It turns out that some animals can count and this has been proven by the observations of scientists.
11. 11. Internet resourcesCrow - http://horoscope.info.ge/Images/yvavi.gifPisces - http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5603/michaelsmirnoff.8c/0_4e796_c0893387_XLChimpanzee - http://www. wpclipart.com/animals/primates/chimp/chimpanzee_in_tree_T.pngCanary - http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5014/89635038.5fe/0_6f5d0_b7cee3be_XLSalamander - http://www.risk.ru/i/post/157 /157132_full.jpgRat - http://samara.strana-ru.ru/cache/pics/samar_050/1268556668_b8c9b633_1_bJackdaw - http://album.foto.ru:8080/photos/or/51915/1634140.jpg

Municipal budgetary institution

"Ermakovskaya secondary school No. 2"

Research

“Can animals think?”

Kulinchenko Kamilla and Syatkin Dima

Supervisor : Tyulberova A.A.,

Primary school teacher, secondary school No. 2

Ermakovskoye, 2016

Introduction

Chapter I. Theoretical review of the literature.

1. .The science that studies animal intelligence.

1. .Results of research by scientists.

1. .The smartest animal.

Chapter II. Identification of the general opinion of interviewed people about the ability of animals to think.

2.1.Organization and methods of research.

2.2. Observations.

2.3.Questioning.

2.5.IQ test for cats.

Conclusion.

Bibliography.

Application.

Introduction

We have pets at home - cats, dogs, fish. We love watching them. There is an opinion among people that animals are intelligent beings. Evidence of this can be given from life - a dog can run for a newspaper, cats show off caught mice. There is a story about how a dog comes at certain times for many years to meet his long-lost sailor owner. How can we explain the behavior of some animals? "Can animals think?" "Do they have intelligence?"

These questions have been worrying people for a long time. And today, the mysteries of animal behavior are of interest not only to scientists, but also to all nature lovers.

Hypothesis: we assume that animals are capable of thinking.

Objects of research: cats, hamsters.

Subject of study:intellectual abilities of animals.

Goal of the work : find the answer to the question - can animals think?

Tasks:

1) study the literature on this topic;

2) watch feature and popular science films;

3) watch pets;

4) interview relatives and friends;

5) analyze the results and formulate conclusions

Working methods:

theoretical: studying sources of information;

practical: observation, questioning;

Interviewing;

Generalization and conclusions.

Practical significance: the results of the study can be used in lessons about the world around us, in the classroom and in life.

Chapter I Theoretical literature review.

1. The science that studies animal intelligence.

As a result of studying the topic, we became acquainted with the science of cognitive ethology.Cognitive ethology(Latin cognitio - knowledge) studies animal intelligence. Intelligence is understood as the ability to carry out the process of cognition and solve problems, in particular when mastering a new range of life tasks. “Cognitive” means “the process of knowing.” Cognitive processes include perception, memorization, information processing, and decision making.

Cognitive ethology is a relatively new science, around which until recently there were critical opinions regarding its scientific status.

Cognitive ethology shares common areas of study with a number of scientific fields and disciplines. Within the framework of cognitive ethology, the following is considered:

Zoopsychology studies the patterns and functions of the psyche, innate and acquired, considering in a comparative aspect the psychology of primates and humans, especially children.

Comparative psychology- a branch of psychology that studies the similarities and differences in behavior and psyche between animals and humans

Ethology studies innate, instinctive forms of behavior

1.2. Scientists' research results

When asked whether animals think, scientists answer this question in different ways. While animal behavior is studied only in laboratories using physiological methods, the answer was: no, they don’t think, they have only instincts and reflexes. I. P. Pavlov fined his employees for the expressions: “the dog thought,” “the dog wanted,” “the dog felt.” . But at the end of his career, he already wrote that the conditioned reflex is not only a physiological, but also a psychological phenomenon.

German scientist Herman Reimarus admitted the existence of actions in animals that can be compared with rational human behavior. Reimarus, like his contemporaries and predecessors, included in this category, first of all, the ability to imitate and learn.

He spoke for the first time about the presence of intelligence and emotions in animals Charles Darwin , who believed that, along with instincts and associations, they also have the “ability of reasoning.” Darwin believed that the rudiments of reason (“the ability to reason” - English reasoning) are as inherent in many animals as instincts and the ability to learn.

A friend and like-minded person of Darwin also spoke about the evolutionary process, John Romence (1848-1894). The most famous was his book “The Mind of Animals” (1888), where he acted as a naturalist who sought to prove the unity and continuity of the development of the psyche at all levels of the evolutionary process.

A. N. Severtsov in his book “Evolution and Psyche” (1922), he believed that in animals, in addition to instincts and simple conditioned reflexes, there is a type of behavior that can be characterized as intelligent.

Head of the Laboratory of Physiology and Genetics of Behavior, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University, Doctor of Biological SciencesZoya Alexandrovna Zorina: “The unique abilities of man and his thinking really have biological prerequisites. And between the human psyche and the psyche of animals there is not that impassable gap that was somehow attributed and implied for a long time. Moreover, back in the middle of the 19th century, Darwin said about this that the difference between the psyche of humans and animals, no matter how great it may be, is a difference in degree, not in quality.”

She made a special contribution to the study of animal behavior and psycheNadezhda Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kots(Fig. 1). In 1913, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Ladygina-Cats bought a chimpanzee who was 1.5 years old. And for two and a half years she studied him, described his behavior and for the first time showed clearly, reliably, experimentally that, at least in chimpanzees, there are elements of human thinking, that they are capable of generalization.

During these same years, in 1914, a German scientist Wolfgang Köhler , working all these years with a colony of monkeys, I became convinced that anthropoid monkeys, great apes, in any case... that their behavior is by no means only and not so much the result of training; and not only instincts and some innate reactions underlie their behavior; that these animals are capable, when they are faced with a new task for which they have a solution, as such, neither innate nor acquired as a result of learning, that they are capable of solving these problems. How? By analyzing the situation that has arisen.

At the beginning of the 20th century (1900-1904) Baron W. von Osten, convinced of the enormous mental abilities of horses, he taught several of them to distinguish colors, the alphabet and “counting.” The horse indicated recognition of each letter or number with the corresponding number of hoof strokes.

Foreign scientists came to such conclusions only now, but our ornithologists knew all this a long time ago. That is, that the crow has intelligence. More than two years ago, an article in the newspaper “World of News” was called “Intellectual Crow”. And it says that the famous Russian scientist Leonid Viktorovich Krushinsky compiled something like a rating of the mental abilities of fauna representatives. From this rating it is clear that among the birds the most intelligent are crows and jackdaws (jackdaws, by the way, belong to the same family of corvids as ravens and crows), moreover, in terms of mental development, crows are higher than cats, dogs and even wolves. “Seven-year-old children could cope with some of the tasks that wolves solved,” scientists say. “It’s easy to assume that a crow’s intelligence corresponds to the intelligence of an eight or nine year old child.”

1.3.The smartest animal

Ask five scientists to list the smartest animals and you will get five different answers. Most experts consider humans to be the most developed, complex and intelligent animal, but some question this. One of the challenges in determining which animals are the smartest is that there are several different types of intelligence: the ability to communicate, the ability to adapt to their environment, and the ability to solve problems. And scientists have always tried to find out how the brains of animals work - despite the fact that communication between animals and people is very limited. People traditionally consider themselves the smartest creatures. We know how to think, analyze, remember and reproduce information. However, we are not the only ones who can do this. Here is a list of the 6 smartest animals, which in their mental abilities are not very different from people. (Table 1)

Table 1.

Chapter II Identification of the general opinion of interviewed people about the ability of animals to think.

2.1. Organization and methods of research.

We conducted an interview to identify opinions about whether animals can think. The following questions were asked:

1. Do animals think or not?

2. What role can understanding their thinking abilities play?

In order to find the answer, we went to a veterinary hospital and interviewed a veterinarian, Elena Sergeevna Krytsina.

In response to our questions, Elena Sergeevna said that in her opinion animals think and even feel. When animals come for treatment, they are nervous and worried. Of course, animals differ from each other in their behavior, just like people, they are different in character. When some animals are brought in for treatment, they behave calmly, as if they are waiting for help, and feel human kindness, although the treatment is a little painful. Other pets are very worried, scream, break out of their hands, try to run away, and when they return to the hospital, they behave the same way, remembering the unpleasant procedures.

We took a sick cat for a conversation with a veterinarian - his ears hurt, Elena Sergeevna examined Kuzya and prescribed treatment. Now our cat is healthy.

When we were at the circus, at the performance we looked at different animals, most of all we liked the scene with the crocodile. The trainer showed a number - a fight between a man and a crocodile. At the end of the show, we asked the trainer if animals think? In his opinion: “The mind cannot develop in reptiles at any brain size. They are cold-blooded and their brain functions in such a way that all conditioned reflexes are lost when the brain is cooled to a certain low temperature. But all human intelligence consists of conditioned reflexes. Without them we would be animals."

2.2. Observations.

The dogs and cats that live nearby amaze with their intelligence. We haven’t opened the gate for the dog for a long time; she copes with it very well on her own. Standing on its hind legs, it reaches for the handle with its front legs and presses it, and knows perfectly well which way it opens. If you need to enter, she leans on it, and if you go out, she opens it on herself with her teeth and paws.

We have Djungarian hamsters living at home - they are very interesting to watch. Khoma the hamster has two wheels in his cage, he always sleeps in one and runs in the other, and he never gets them mixed up. We also conducted an experiment - we wrapped a piece of apple in a candy wrapper. The hamsters easily took their favorite treat out of the wrapper.

Some people consider animals to be simply biorobots that have no feelings, but only instincts and reflexes. Undoubtedly, these very instincts and reflexes underlie the behavior of animals. But none of the people who have the slightest contact with animals will deny that they have feelings that cannot be called anything other than reasonable.

2.3. Questioning.

We conducted a survey on the topic “Do animals think?” among children of 4th grade. 25 children were interviewed. The questionnaire consists of 5 questions. (Table 2)

Table 2

From the answers, it became clear that all families of the children surveyed have pets, and even several. All 25 children answered that they love their pets, are happy to communicate with them, and their mood improves.

To the question “Do animals think?”

86% answered “Yes”

4% answered “No”

“I don’t know” 10% answered

Schedule 1

A survey was also conducted among the parents of those previously interviewed children and the question “do animals think”

74% answered “Yes”

16% answered “No”

“I don’t know” 10% answered

Schedule

2.4. Analysis of fiction.

While working on our topic, we read not only scientific literature, but also fiction. We read stories about animals by famous writers, about their relationship to the animal world. (Table 3)

Table 3

2.5. IQ test for cats

Intelligence tests are very widely used these days in America and Europe to determine the mental potential of adults and children. Based on the results of this test, the intelligence quotient (IQ) is determined. The higher the IQ, the more highly developed a person (or animal) is considered. A great variety of IQ tests have been developed, including for various types of animals.

Using these tests, we decided to determine the IQ of our cat. The intelligence test for domestic cats evaluates motor coordination, the ability to communicate without words, and adaptation to the cat's environment.

According to the test results, the cat scored 78 points. And this means that he is smart. See Appendix 1.

Conclusion.

The material presented shows that animals actually have the rudiments of thinking. The main feature of thinking is that it ensures the animal’s ability to make a new adequate decision at the first meeting with an unusual situation.

Scientists call animal intelligence differently: thinking, intelligence, reason or rational activity. As a rule, the word “elementary” is added, because no matter how “smart” animals behave, only a few elements of human thinking are available to them.

The observations we received and the study of literature helped us draw the conclusion: “Yes, animals think, but not like people!” But, despite the external complexity and apparent “reasonableness” of the behavior of animals in nature, their ability to think is at a low level and is weakly expressed. Most of the apparently complex forms of their behavior are based on instincts and individual experience acquired by animals during their lives.

But let's not forget that the process of knowledge is endless, that any scientific discovery raises new questions and often poses more than it solves. But one answer is known for sure: a person must finally understand that all life on Earth has the right to life, and in conditions when enormous forces and opportunities are concentrated in the hands of man, man is responsible for nature, for its preservation and development. Otherwise, he cannot be considered reasonable, since real intelligence must be good. Man must learn this kindness from animals, even if their minds are not very similar to his own. And only when a person becomes kind and generous will he be able to find a common language with animals, only then will their minds and ours understand each other.

Bibliography

1.Zhanna Reznikova. Intelligence and language of animals and humans. Fundamentals of cognitive ethology. - 1st ed. - M.: Akademkniga, 2005. - 518 p.

2. Károly Akos “Do Animals Think?”

3.Z.A.Zorina. Elementary thinking of animals: Textbook. M.: Aspect Press, 2002.- 320 p.

4.K.E.Fabry. Basics of zoopsychology

Application

IQ test for cats

When performing test tasks, do not try to force the cat to act correctly, just watch it carefully if you want to get an objective result. Kittens younger than eight weeks should not be tested. The test does not require any special equipment. A rope, a pillow, a mirror and a large plastic bag with handles are all you need.

Part I

Answer the questions carefully.

If you answer, your cat gets 1 point

3 points

5 points.

Questions

1. Does your cat sense your mood changes throughout the day?

2. The cat follows at least two verbal orders, for example: , ?

3. Does the cat recognize the owner's facial expression, for example, a smile, an angry frown, an expression of pain or fear?

4. Has the cat developed its own language to express its feelings and desires, for example: purring, squeaking, purring, screaming?

5. The cat has a certain washing order, for example, first it washes its face with its paw, then licks its back and hind legs, and so on.

6. The cat associates certain events with feelings of joy or pain, for example: a car ride, a visit to the veterinarian, and so on.

7. Does the cat have a memory: does it remember names, places it has been to before, favorite but rarely received foods?

8. Does the cat tolerate the presence of other animals, even if they approach it closer than 1 meter?

9. Does the cat have a sense of time, for example, does it know the time of feeding, brushing, etc.?

10. Does the cat use the same paw to wash certain areas of its face, for example, does it wash only the left half of its face with its left paw?

Part II

Follow the test directions exactly. Each task can be repeated 3 times, with the highest number of points scored.

First task.

Place a large, open plastic bag. Make sure your cat sees the package. Then watch carefully and give the cat points.

A. The cat approaches the package with curiosity - 1 point.

B. Touches the bag with some part of the body (nose, mustache, paw, etc.) - 1 point.

B. The cat looks into the bag - 2 points.

D. She enters the bag, then immediately comes out - 3 points.

D. The cat enters the bag and remains there for at least 10 seconds - 3 points.

Second task.

Take a medium-sized pillow and a rope or twine approximately 1 meter long. Place a pillow in front of the cat, while she watches the moving rope. Then slowly pull the rope under the pillow so that it gradually disappears on one side of the pillow and appears on the other.

A. The cat follows the movement of the rope with its eyes - 1 point.

B. The cat touches the rope with its paw - 1 point.

B. She looks at the place on the pillow where the rope disappeared - 2 points.

D. Tries to catch the end of the rope under the pillow with his paw - 2 points.

D. The cat lifts the pillow with its paw to see if the rope is there - 2 points.

E. She looks at the pillow from the side where the rope will appear or has already appeared - 3 points.

Third task.

You need a portable mirror approximately 60-120 cm in size. Place the mirror against a wall or furniture. Place the cat in front of the mirror. Watch her and score points.

A. The cat approaches the mirror - 2 points.

B. Notices his reflection in the mirror - 2 points.

B. Hit the mirror with his paw, plays with his reflection - 3 points.

The owner answers the questions in this task based on his observations of the cat.

1. Your cat knows his way around the apartment well. This manifests itself in such a way that the cat always runs to the right windows and doors if something interesting happens behind them - 5 points.

2. The cat releases objects from its paw in accordance with its desire or as directed by the owner. Your cat will never drop an object by accident - 5 points.

Part IV

If the answer to the questions in this task is positive, the indicated points will be subtracted from the total points scored in previous tasks.

1. The cat sleeps or dozes more time than it is awake - subtract 2 points.

2. The cat often plays with its own tail - deduct 1 point.

3. The cat has trouble finding its way around the apartment and may even get lost - deduct 2 points.

Evaluation of results:

Calculate the total points scored in the first three parts and subtract the points scored in the fourth part from it.

82-88 points - your cat is talented and very smart

75-81 points - your cat is very smart

69-74 points - your cat’s mental abilities are above average

56-68 points - your cat's mental abilities are average

50-55 points - your cat's mental abilities are slightly below average

44-49 points - your cat is stupid

43 points or less - your cat is completely stupid.

In 1891, retired German teacher Wilhelm von Osteen set out to teach his horse Hans arithmetic. Starting with the basics of addition and subtraction, the man soon realized he could do more. As a result, he taught his horse to solve more complex problems: multiplying, dividing, subtracting from two-digit numbers and even extracting roots. Hans gave his answers by tapping his hoof on the ground a certain number of times.

The rumor about the learned horse quickly spread throughout Europe

It’s no wonder that rumors about the animal’s mathematical talents quickly spread throughout Germany and beyond. People flocked from all over Europe to see with their own eyes a horse that could count. However, scientists could not believe it and decided to assemble a special commission to study Hans’ abilities. And one of the members of this commission, psychologist Oskar Pfungst, noticed one strange feature during repeated research. The person asking the questions knows the answer and gives non-verbal cues to the horse.

Ultimately, Pfungst proved that the horse cannot count; it simply clatters its hooves and waits for the signal to stop in time. Minor head nods or straightening of the back were used as such signals. But the commission’s conclusion did not disappoint the horse’s owner at all, and Hans and his owner continued to tour with performances throughout Germany, and the public greeted them with a bang. However, this case has now become of interest to the scientists themselves, who set out to find out whether there are animals in nature that have the ability to count.

Features of lions existing in prides

One of the most basic and elementary numeracy skills is determining how much more one quantity is than another. Did you know that lions living in the Serengeti National Park are excellent at this task? Animals can easily determine how different their pride is in size from another. Brian Butterward, an employee at University College London, talks about this. The scientist claims that lions attack an enemy pride only if they outnumber it.

And Karen McComb from the University of Sussex in Brighton (UK) conducted the following experiment. A researcher imitated the roars of a hostile pride while interacting with lions in Tanzania. As the five lionesses gathered together, McComb imitated the sounds a group of three lions would make. The lionesses, hearing the roar, immediately rushed to attack the place where the loudspeaker was hidden.

However, lions are unlikely to be able to integrate digital information exceeding the roar of six individuals. In this case, a strong roar begins to mislead the animals. However, this impressive behavior of lion prides has led scientists to study other species of animals.

Mathematical abilities of hyenas

Similar experiments were carried out on chimpanzees, other monkeys and hyenas. And in all cases, the experiments gave similar results. Thus, spotted hyenas were especially successful in comparison skills, and they could count both the number of sounds and the number of objects themselves. Karen McComb states an irrefutable fact: hyenas can solve some pretty complex problems. However, let us agree that simply identifying more or less is not enough, and we want to know whether animals can understand the exact sequence.

Research on the Mathematical Abilities of Domestic Dogs

Who do you and I consider the most intelligent and intelligent animals? Of course, dogs. Krista McPherson, an employee of the University of Western Ontario (Canada), conducted tests among domestic dogs.
She observed how dogs distinguished the amount of food in opaque bowls. It turned out that dogs can only distinguish between “1” and “0”. They understand the difference when there is no food in a bowl and there is a bowl with one food item nearby. Dogs cannot distinguish between more than one food item. We apologize to the passionate dog lovers who believe that their pets are the smartest creatures on the planet.

Pacific tree frogs

Counting objects or sounds is not always needed by animals only for attack or defense. This skill is good when choosing a mating partner. Thus, the Pacific tree frog must find the right mate to reproduce healthy offspring. This is not always easy visually, because many species are very similar to each other.

This is why frogs make characteristic sounds with a certain number of impulses. The duration of the sound made by a male Pacific tree frog can reach 10 notes. This means that the female must correctly assess the situation and calculate the required number of impulses, also focusing on the duration and volume of sounds. So, frogs calculate the number of impulses in the sounds they make in order to find a potential mate, and bees do this to make it easier to navigate in space.

Worker bees

Worker bees fly from their hive in search of food. After a bee finds nectar, it collects it. If the marker with food is artificially removed, the bee still first flies to the place that it remembered for the first time. However, after a new place with nectar is found, the bee will not forget about its old route. If the next marker is also veiled, the insect will find the third place, but will also store the entire route in memory. This way, the bees can remember how far they have traveled by counting the number of markers between the food and the hive.

Numeracy skills in primates

There is evidence that counting is an innate skill in primates, our closest biological relatives. And some of them really succeeded in this. Thus, Tetsuro Matsuzawa from Kyoto University in Japan has been researching this issue for four decades. 39-year-old chimpanzee Ai became the first animal to understand the Arabic characters “1” and “2” and learned to match the number of dots on a computer display with the numeric characters on the keyboard. The monkey also managed to learn the sequence of the number line up to 5 using apples as an example.

It turns out that evolution gave chimpanzees the ability to calculate. Scientists say this skill is possible thanks to the neocortex, the part of the brain that is responsible for counting. Of course, many animals have this section, but in primates it is closest to that of humans.

The history of objective studies of numerical competence in animals dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. The origins of this field lie in several early experiments, and one of them is an instructive anecdote that has been cited in many textbooks, articles, and reports for over a century as an example of the need for strict control in experiments. We are talking about an Oryol trotter named Clever Hans, which his owner, Baron von Osten, demonstrated as being able not only to distinguish numbers written on the board, but also to carry out arithmetic operations and even extract roots (see: Rybenko, this collection). Hans indicated the results with the corresponding number of hoof strokes. A commission of psychologists and animal psychologists was assembled to discuss and review these achievements. Von Osten had no intention of misleading the experts; he sincerely believed in the exceptional mental abilities of horses, among which Hans was the most capable, but not his only student. It was not immediately possible to establish that the horse reacts to changes in the owner’s behavior that are imperceptible to people. Therefore, he answered only those questions to which von Osten himself knew the answer. So, horses do not know how to extract roots. What are the limits of the numerical competence of animals? This review analyzes the results of studies by experimenters who worked with a wide variety of creatures, from bipeds to six-legs. The first experiments revealing the ability to count in quadrupeds were carried out on rhesus monkeys by A. Kinnaman. Significantly expanded the knowledge of how animals operate with quantitative features of objects , experiments conducted with them in the laboratory of cognitive primatology at Columbia University. Elizabeth Brannon and laboratory director Herbert Terrace found that rhesus monkeys can arrange pictures with different numbers of objects in ascending and descending order, moreover, they are able to transfer the skills gained from operating with a sequence of fewer objects to a sequence of more. Experiments were also conducted with chimpanzees, who more quickly mastered experiments that revealed their ability to count and numerology. The chimpanzees studied learned to use Arabic numerals, that is, symbols to indicate the number of elements in sets presented to them. T. Matsuzawa raised the mathematically gifted chimpanzee Ai, named after the first letters of Artificial Intelligence, with the goal of “contrasting” the successes of a living animal with the achievements of robots. The researcher taught Ai to distinguish between groups of pictures on the screen and the Arabic numerals from 1 to 7. The results of Ai's selection did not depend on the size, color, shape and relative position of the elements in the groups. Sarah Boysen and her colleagues developed a method that allowed, gradually increasing the complexity of tasks , show that chimpanzees are able not only to estimate, count and indicate the number of objects, but also to perform basic arithmetic operations. Chimpanzee Sheba was taught almost all the elements of “true counting.” Experiments were also carried out with elephants. These animals are able to distinguish such numbers even more accurately than humans. Elephants are highly intelligent animals and are members of a small, elite group of animals that also includes humans, great apes, magpies and dolphins. All of the above have the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror image. Elephants show a feeling of regret after the death of one of the representatives of these animals, they take care of their brothers if they are sick. This time, an Asian elephant named Ashya surprised: he proved that he is a real wizard of mathematics. When the trainer threw 3 apples into the first bucket and 1 apple into the second bucket, then 4 more apples into the first bucket and 5 apples into the second, the elephant was able to calculate that 3+4 is more than 5 and chose the bucket that contained 7 apples All this proves that numerical information is an evolutionarily important aspect. As scientists say, numerical information helps animals in determining the strength of the enemy and its number. Having approximately counted the number of rivals, the animals decide whether they should engage in a fight or not.

Everything about everything. Volume 3 Likum Arkady

Can animals count?

You may have seen trained seals, bears, and dogs in the circus who can solve simple arithmetic problems. Isn't it true that it seems as if these animals can count? However, in reality this is not the case! It's just that the seal or dog receives "tips" from their trainers. A dog barking three times in response to the question: “What is five minus two?” - stops, having received a signal from its owner, invisible to the viewer, for example, a nod of the head. Of course, animals are able to distinguish large quantities of something from smaller ones. Many of them, from two baskets, one of which contains five pieces of food, and the other six, choose the second.

The same, however, can be said about very young children who have no idea about numbers and figures. However, the ability to distinguish more from less and the ability to count are not the same thing. However, scientists believe that some species of animals and birds actually possess this skill. In one of the experiments set up to test this statement, a pigeon was offered food one grain at a time. Moreover, every time after six good grains, he was offered the seventh, which was not suitable for food. After some time, the pigeon learned to count to six, and when the seventh grain was put in front of him, he even refused to try it!

In another experiment, chimpanzees were taught to pick up one, two, three, four or five straws from the ground and hand them to a person exactly as much as he asked for. However, if there were more than five straws, the chimpanzee began to get confused and make mistakes.