"Villortigara and his colleagues [Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trento and Lucia Regolin of the University of Padua] also found that chickens can perform basic geometry. They placed chicks in a rectangular room with an object in one corner. They then removed the object and the chicks from the room and brought the chicks back with the task of identifying the corner in which the object was previously located. This is an extraordinarily difficult task with no straightforward solution. Chicks, however, can solve this problem with ease. The researchers believe that he chickens use the different lengths of the walls and the angular positions to reorient themselves. They can learn, for instance, that the correct corners are the ones with a short wall on the left and a long wall on the right." (Amy Hatkoff, The Inner World of Farm Animals [Steward, Tabori & Chang, New York, 2009], p. 34.)
This geometric capability is probably an expression of mental mapping of reality. If honey bees have mental maps, surely the chickens do. In the chicks' behavior, we can distinguish between frame perception and an object perception. This perception must be euclidean.
Comments