期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2022
卷号：119
期号：32
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2201039119
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
Numerosity, that is, the number of items in a set, is a significant aspect in the perception of the environment. Behavioral and in silico experiments suggest that number sense belongs to a core knowledge system and can be present already at birth. However, neurons sensitive to the number of visual items have been so far described only in the brain of adult animals. Therefore, it remained unknown to what extent their selectivity would depend on visual learning and experience. We found number neurons in the caudal nidopallium (a higher associative area functionally similar to the mammalian prefrontal cortex) of very young, numerically naïve domestic chicks. This result suggests that numerosity perception is possibly an inborn feature of the vertebrate brain.
Numerical cognition is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. Domestic chicks are a widely used developmental model for studying numerical cognition. Soon after hatching, chicks can perform sophisticated numerical tasks. Nevertheless, the neural basis of their numerical abilities has remained unknown. Here, we describe number neurons in the caudal nidopallium (functionally equivalent to the mammalian prefrontal cortex) of young domestic chicks. Number neurons that we found in young chicks showed remarkable similarities to those in the prefrontal cortex and caudal nidopallium of adult animals. Thus, our results suggest that numerosity perception based on number neurons might be an inborn feature of the vertebrate brain.
