Chickens Agree: Left Means Less; Right Means More | Hacker News Reader

Chickens Agree: Left Means Less; Right Means More

nytimes.com

25 pointssgustard12 comments

“We cannot think of any other, and simpler, explanation for the behavior of the chicks" Dr. Rugani said in an email.

Is anyone else skeptical about their findings? I am reminded of the Feynman story about the rat experiment by Mr. Young. http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experim...

My favorite line from the article:

>The scientists trained 64 chicks to find a mealworm behind a plastic panel with five red squares on it (16 chicks were disqualified after showing “poor mealworm-following behavior,” the researchers wrote).

agree, the 16 left-winged superbrain chickens with X-ray eyes where disqualified... :-)

"a possibility that was raised by some studies that found that in Arabic-speaking countries, where letters and numbers are read right to left, the mental number scale was reversed."

This is wrong, despite Arabic being an RTL language, in Arabic numbers are written, and read [1], in the same orientation as in Latin, Left to right. e.g. So 1,230 is written in the same orientation in arabic.

[1] this applies to all numbers with more than 3 digits. things are a little more complex for 2 digits numbers. As in English and French 12, or 11 are speller as "one word", however 35 in Arabic is spelled five and thirty instead of thirty five.

[2] the "latin" numerals are actually arabic numerals. The current numbers used in Arabic speaking countries are suspected to be of Roman origin according the wikipida article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals.

One thing that interests me, though the article and study don't touch on it, is that we as humans tend to visualize our number lines on the X axis (e.g. left and right), rather than the Y axis (up and down), Z axis (forward and backward), or W axis (ana and kata).

I know there are some writing systems in which writing is done up/down rather than left/right. I wonder how that influences the spatial visualization of numbers.

I also wonder whether other species might visualize numbers on something other than the X axis.

I heard once[1] that whether people visualize time on a left-right / x-axis or a back-front z-axis correlates to generally how organised they are.

[1]I don't have a source, so consider it "bloke down the pub" reliability.

I think that the ancient Greeks envisioned the future coming from behind them. Of course, they didn't have a notion x-axis, did they?

Do people from RTL countries visualise numbers the same way?

What about their chickens?

In arabic the numbers are written the same way they are in english. This makes it very strange to watch someone type because they are typing from right to left, and then the computer switches from adding to the left to adding characters on the right of the curser when you start to enter a number.

I didn't interact much with Iraqi chickens, so I can't answer the second part of your question.

Are chickens generally right footed? Do they have a dominant foot?

Don't know, but I've heard all left-wings are chickens.

I visualize my numbers in boustrophedon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com