As many of us will know from kindergarten and elementary school, using colored blocks to teach children the four operations is an extremely common method. With this method, it can become easier to teach children basic mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
However, it seems that some sea creatures can also learn mathematics thanks to this method. It has been discovered that cichlids and stingrays, who have undergone similar training by scientists, can successfully learn simple mathematical operations.
Sea creatures are taught basic math
According to an article published Thursday in Scientific Reports, the research team found that these animals exhibited the ability to learn basic math and even taught them this information. He stated that they used it to solve the given little logic puzzles. “We trained the animals to do simple addition and subtraction,” said Vera Schluessel of the Institute of Zoology at the University of Bonn and lead author of the study. “In doing so, they had to increase or decrease an initial value one by one.” he added.
The research team first gave an image of one to five squares, circles and triangles to an animal they put in the tank. Sometimes only blue and yellow were used as colors in these shapes, which are in different sizes and in a mixed form. The blue color meant “add one”, while the yellow color meant “take one out”. For example, if three blue squares were displayed, it was synonymous with “3+1”. At this initial stage, animals had to recognize the number of depicted objects and at the same time grasp the rule of calculating from their color.
After memorizing the picture shown to him, each animal was given two new pictures this time. One of the images had one less shape while the other had two more shapes. Depending on the shape and color of the image shown, the animals had to swim towards the second image corresponding to this image.
For example: Let’s say a stingray was first shown four yellow shapes. It was the equivalent of asking them what a 4-1 is. Accordingly, when two new images are shown, what the stingray has to do is swim towards the picture with three shapes on it. This process may seem quite simple to us at the moment, but it is extremely difficult for a creature like a fish to grasp. “When the original image was replaced with two result images, they had to keep both in working memory. And then they had to decide on the correct outcome.” “Overall, an achievement that requires complex thinking skills,” Schlussel said. recorded as.
Animal subjects were rewarded with a small reward each time they answered correctly. The process that sea creatures got better and better in these processes over time was the extraction process, which was the most difficult process, which can be said to be valid for humans as well.
After the training phase, it was time for the testing phase. The researchers wanted to make sure these animals weren’t just trained to get yummy rewards with certain images, but instead really internalized how addition and subtraction is done. For this, the researchers, who deliberately skipped the 3+1 and 3-1 processes during training, observed that the answers given by the animals that encountered these two processes for the first time during the testing phase were still mostly correct. Subjects generally had good results, even as the researchers made the process more complex over time.
Sea creatures can exhibit a thought process similar to humans
Considering that it has been proven in the past that fish can distinguish numerical values, this result is not so surprising; however, the ability of these creatures to use complex strategies such as arithmetic is still quite impressive. Considering that unlike us and other vertebrates, they do not have a cerebral cortex to complete complex cognitive tasks, it is fascinating that these creatures exhibit a thought process similar to ours.
With all this, the researchers underline that these findings add to a unified pool of evidence that fish are much smarter than we thought and deserve much more respect than we do.
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