<story><title>Bees can link symbols to numbers, study finds</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2019-06-bees-link.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>YeGoblynQueenne</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Researchers have trained honeybees to match a character to a specific quantity, revealing they are able to learn that a symbol represents a numerical amount.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if this is very convincing. From what I see in the images shown in the article, the &amp;quot;specific quantities&amp;quot; are represented by different arrangements of various symbols- squares, stars etc.&lt;p&gt;The article doesn&amp;#x27;t say whether these arrangements were randomised in each image.&lt;p&gt;For instance - the number &amp;quot;3&amp;quot; could be _always_ associated with the same arrangement of any symbol. Say, a triangle formed by three identical symbol. In that case it would be impossible to know whether the bees learned to count the shapes or just identify their arrangment. Learning to identify a triangle doesn&amp;#x27;t say anything about the ability to identify quantities.&lt;p&gt;The fact that neither of the two groups trained on the two different tasks (character-to-quantity and quantity-to-character) could generalise their learning to the opposite task also doesn&amp;#x27;t bode well. It is exactly what you would expect to see if the setup for each task had some other, uncontrolled for, variable that the bees &amp;quot;overfitted&amp;quot; to, rather than learning what is theorised they did learn.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bees can link symbols to numbers, study finds</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2019-06-bees-link.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>empath75</author><text>Seems like one set of researchers has had two breakthrough studies of bee intelligence. Has anyone reproduced this? I feel like for something this incredible, we should perhaps wait until another team can reproduce the results before getting too excited.</text></comment>