Ants' Notion of Zero through the Perception of the Absence of an Odor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Workers of the ant Myrmica sabuleti can acquire the notion of ‘nothing’, i.e. a basic concept of zero, through olfactory conditioning, the best when the odor is unpleasant (onion odor) and when the response to the absence of the odor is rewarded. With a pleasant odor (lavender, rosemary or vanilla odor), the ants learn best when the response to the odor is rewarded. To our knowledge this is the first time that olfactory operant conditioning is obtained in animals by rewarding their response to ‘nothing’. The present work also points out: - the impact of the kind and quality of the cue to be learned on the animals’ learning score, - the improvement of a given learning over successive similar learning experiments, - the obtaining of a better learning when the reward is associated with the animals’ preference.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".