PARIS —
Bees order numbers in increasing size from left to right, a study has shown for
the first time, supporting the much-debated theory that this direction is
inherent in all animals including humans.
اضافة اعلان
Western research
has found that even before children learn to count, they start organizing
growing quantities from left to right in what has been called the “mental
number line”.
However the
opposite direction has been found in people from cultures that use an Arabic
script, which reads from right to left.
“The subject is
still being debated between those who think the mental number line has an
innate character and those who say it is cultural,” said Martin Giurfa, a
professor at the Research Center on Animal Cognition at Paul Sabatier
University in Toulouse, France.
There has been
recent evidence that newborn babies and some vertebrate animals, including
primates, organize numbers from left to right.
Giurfa led a
study, published in October in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences (PNAS), aiming to find out if the same holds true for insects, via
an experiment on bees.
“It has already
been shown that bees are able to count — at least up to five,” Giurfa told AFP.
They also
process information differently in the two hemispheres of their brains, he
added. This trait they seem to share with humans and is thought to be a
potential reason for the “the existence of the mental number line”, Giurfa
said.
A numbers game
For the experiment, the researchers had individual
honeybees fly into
the first of two compartments of a wooden box. Sugar-water was then used to
entice the bees to select a number affixed to the middle of the back of the
second compartment.
The number
stayed the same for each individual bee, but varied randomly across the group
from between one, three, or five, in shapes of circles, squares, or triangles.
‘It has already been shown that bees are able to count — at least up to five’
Once the bees
were trained to fly towards their set number, the researchers removed it and
put another number on both sides of the second compartment, leaving the middle
blank. They then removed the sugar-water reward and observed which way the bees
went. For example, if the bee was trained to select the number three, and was
now faced with two number ones on either side and nothing in the middle, which
way did they fly?
Around 80
percent of the time, the bees chose the option on the left — the “correct
choice” if brains order numbers from left to right, Giurfa said. But if those
same bees were given two number fives to choose from, they went right, again
supporting the mental number line. And bees trained to go for number one went
to the right for a number three, while bees targeting a five went left for
their three.
So if animals do
in fact think of numbers from left to right, why is this not true for all
humans?
Giurfa said it
was more complicated than directly choosing between nature and nurture. Even if
the mental number line “is innate, culture can still modify it, even reverse it
— or on the contrary, accentuate it”, he said.
Bees, on the
other hand, have to stick to what nature dictates.
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