Babies barely a few hours old seem to possess the ability to think of numbers as abstract concepts. Harvard University researchers say that babies barely a few hours old seem to possess the ability to ...

Several vertebrate species can distinguish between, say, two and five bananas—but with the exception of primates, they can’t grasp the numerical rules that would let them arrange their piles of fruit ...

Damian Scarf at New Zealand's University of Otago reports in the current issue of the journal Science that experiments he conducted with colleagues show that pigeons can learn abstract rules about ...

Several species of animal can count, but only humans can do so using abstract number symbols like ‘2’ or ‘4’. Now we know we do so using a different set of brain cells from those we use to recognise ...