SONIC · Sense Of Number in Invertebrate Cognition

We are experimenting a novel cognitive revolution with the accumulation of evidence on the unexpected intelligence of key invertebrate species. Indeed, abstraction faculties, emotion-like behaviours, social imitation, or tool use, among other capacities, were long considered as the prerogative of large-brained vertebrates but now proven to be accessible to Invertebrates although to a limited extent. With this project, we wish to pursue this dynamic by offering an invertebrate perspective on the evolution of numerical cognition. In addition, our evolutionary distance with Invertebrate offers the best opportunity to compare numerical systems that evolved independently. Numerical cognition is indeed an ideal framework to explore the limit of what an invertebrate brain can perform with a comparative perspective thanks to historically well-defined and testable levels of complexity in processing quantities. Building from the established evidence of the impressive honeybees’ numerical skills and cephalopods’ general cognition, we propose to explore the limit of the cognitive levels accessible to Invertebrates by testing the possibility for bees and octopus to possess an abstract representation of numbers: are they capable of a symbolic and cross-modal representation of quantities? The proposed research program will thus offer timely decisive elements for a better understanding on the physiological and ecological constraints for numerical cognitive faculties to emerge.