Ants’ Mental Positioning of Amounts on a Number Line
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Myrmica sabuleti ants have a mental number line on which numbers (non-symbolic displayed amounts) are ranked, the smaller on the left and the larger on the right. Here we try to know if the difference between two successive numbers is identically estimated all along this line or is less and less well estimated with increasing number magnitude. Ants were trained to distinguish two successive numbers differing by one unit (1 vs 2, 2 vs 3, …, 6 vs 7) during 72 hours and tested after 7, 24, 31, 48, 55 and 72 h. The ants responded less well for larger numbers (e.g. their response to 6 vs 7 was weaker than that to 1 vs 2). The relation between the ants’ ability in discriminating two successive numbers according to their size, ratio or relative difference was best described by a non-linear, power function and somewhat less well by a logarithmic function. A linear function could only significantly better fit the data when large fluctuations in the ants’ discrimination score appeared in the course of increasing training time. The ants’ mental positioning of numerosity on their number line appears thus to be compressed along a non-linear scale, most likely according to a power function of the numbers’ magnitude characteristics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".