Non-Human Animals
Animals share a non-verbal system for representing number as analogue magnitudes. Animals have been known to base their rationality on Weber’s Law. This historically important psychological law quantifies the perception of change in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus. Weber’s Law describes discriminability between values based on perceptual continua such as line length, brightness, and weight.
Read more about this topic: Ordinal Numerical Competence
Famous quotes containing the words non-human and/or animals:
“Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question, and containing a white blade of light like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn’t know. He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Shall we never have done with that cliché, so stupid that it could only be human, about the sympathy of animals for man when he is unhappy? Animals love happiness almost as much as we do. A fit of crying disturbs them, they’ll sometimes imitate sobbing, and for a moment they’ll reflect our sadness. But they flee unhappiness as they flee fever, and I believe that in the long run they are capable of boycotting it.”
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)