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)
“I wish more and more that health were studied half as much as disease is. Why, with all the endowment of research against cancer is no study made of those who are free from cancer? Why not inquire what foods they eat, what habits of body and mind they cultivate? And why never study animals in health and natural surroundings? why always sickened and in an environment of strangeness and artificiality?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1976–1959)