A comparative study of number discrimination in a counting task

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Pigeons were trained to discriminate arrays consisting of 1, 3, 5, or 8 dots in a counting task which required them to peck each dot sequentially. They successfully learned the task and then displayed transfer to novel arrays consisting of 2,4,6, or 7 dots, in a manner according to the numerical order. Subsequent tests revealed that the pigeons discriminated the stimuli by relying on the number of counting responses and that the number of dots in memory gradually decayed as the passage of time on each trial.