OxTalks is Changing
On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
"Number crunching in animals – from adaptive value to neuronal mechanisms"
Although animals can estimate numerical quantities, true counting and arithmetic abilities are unique to humans and are inextricably linked to symbolic competence. However, our unprecedented numerical skills are deeply rooted in our neuronal heritage as primates and vertebrates. In this article, I argue that numerical competence is a cognitive capacity that also determines an individual’s survival and reproduction success. Animals benefit from numerical competence during foraging, navigating, hunting, predation avoidance, social interactions, and reproductive activities. The internal number representations determine how animals perceive stimulus magnitude which, in turn, constrains animals’ spontaneous decisions in the wild. Moving on to the brain mechanisms of numerical competence, I propose that the physiological mechanisms of quantity estimation are part of our evolutionary heritage and can be witnessed across primate and vertebrate phylogeny. Moreover, I suggest that a basic understanding of number, what numerical quantity means, is innately wired into the brain and gives rise to an intuitive number sense, or number instinct. Finally, I argue that symbolic counting and arithmetic in humans is rooted in an evolutionarily and ontogenetically primeval neural system for non-symbolic number representations. These neural constraints jointly determine the basic processing of number concepts in the animal and human mind.
Date:
11 October 2021, 13:00
Venue:
Venue to be announced
Speakers:
Speaker to be announced
Host:
Alex Kacelnik (University of Oxford)
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Lesley Austyn
