Young Ants Already Possess a Mental Number Line
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The workers of the ant Myrmica sabuleti were previously shown to have a compressed left to right oriented mental number line. It remained to know if they detain this trait soon after their emergence, or if they have to acquire it in the course of their life. We worked on workers a few days to at most 5-6 weeks old, maintained in small artificial nests. We trained them either to a small number of dots versus a larger one, or to a large number versus a smaller one, and tested them in front of twice the small or the large number of dots presented on the left as well as on the right of respectively the larger or the smaller number. The young ants went preferentially to the small number located on the left of the larger one, and to the large number located on the right of the smaller one. Such a left or right preference occurred only in the presence of a larger or a smaller number set between the two small or large presented numbers. Young ants thus mentally locate the small amounts on their left and the larger ones on their right. Their representation of amounts on an oriented line could be native.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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".