The evolution of quantitative sensitivity

The ability to represent approximate quantities appears to be phylogenetically widespread, but the selective pressures and proximate mechanisms favouring this ability remain unknown. We analysed quantity discrimination data from 672 subjects across 33 bird and mammal species, using a novel Bayesian...

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Published inPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences Vol. 377; no. 1844; p. 20200529
Main Authors Bryer, Margaret A. H., Koopman, Sarah E., Cantlon, Jessica F., Piantadosi, Steven T., MacLean, Evan L., Baker, Joseph M., Beran, Michael J., Jones, Sarah M., Jordan, Kerry E., Mahamane, Salif, Nieder, Andreas, Perdue, Bonnie M., Range, Friederike, Stevens, Jeffrey R., Tomonaga, Masaki, Ujfalussy, Dorottya J., Vonk, Jennifer
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England The Royal Society 14.02.2022
Subjects
Animals
Bayes Theorem
Biological Evolution
Cognition - physiology
Humans
Mammals
Phylogeny
Psychophysics
Species Specificity
brain evolution
Weber fraction
quantity discrimination
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0962-8436
1471-2970
1471-2970
DOI10.1098/rstb.2020.0529

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Summary:The ability to represent approximate quantities appears to be phylogenetically widespread, but the selective pressures and proximate mechanisms favouring this ability remain unknown. We analysed quantity discrimination data from 672 subjects across 33 bird and mammal species, using a novel Bayesian model that combined phylogenetic regression with a model of number psychophysics and random effect components. This allowed us to combine data from 49 studies and calculate the Weber fraction (a measure of quantity representation precision) for each species. We then examined which cognitive, socioecological and biological factors were related to variance in Weber fraction. We found contributions of phylogeny to quantity discrimination performance across taxa. Of the neural, socioecological and general cognitive factors we tested, cortical neuron density and domain-general cognition were the strongest predictors of Weber fraction, controlling for phylogeny. Our study is a new demonstration of evolutionary constraints on cognition, as well as of a relation between species-specific neuron density and a particular cognitive ability. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory’.
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These authors contributed equally to this study.
Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5713120.
One contribution of 16 to a theme issue ‘Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory’.
ISSN:0962-8436
1471-2970
1471-2970
DOI:10.1098/rstb.2020.0529