Talk:Cognition August2018/@comment-35453425-20180530154508/@comment-35481611-20180530181038

Seems like maybe the same impasse is reached in interpreting that study. If the numerical magnitude of items in the arrays of a quantity discrimination task is something that the chimps natively tracked and were able to respond on the basis of, that's pretty cool! Makes one think that if they were spontaneously tracking and using that cardinality information in your initial observations they might be disposed to spontaneously use cardinality information in other contexts as well - as a heuristic in quantity discrimination tasks or as a Bayesian confidence booster about items stochastic environments. But since they're eating their quantities, we don't really make that argument since it's more streamlined to say they have an idea of the reward rate to expect given the number of marshmallows they received in their last n trials.